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PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 



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PHILOSOPHY 
AND RELIGION 

SIX LECTURES 
DELIVERED AT CAMBRIDGE 

BY 

HASTINGS RASHDALL 

D. LITT. (OXON.), D.C.L. (dUNELM.) 

FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1910 






Exchange 
Augustana College L5by. 

Seot. 8 193* 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
TO THE SERIES 

Man has no deeper or wider interest than theology ; 
none deeper, for however much he may change, he 
never loses his love of the many questions it covers ; 
and none wider, for under whatever law he may live 
he never escapes from its spacious shade; nor does 
he ever find that it speaks to him in vain or uses a 
voice that fails to reach him. Once the present 
writer was talking with a friend who has equal fame 
as a statesman and a man of letters, and he said, 
'Every day I live. Politics, which are affairs of 
Man and Time, interest me less, while Theology, 
which is an affair of God and Eternity, interests me 
more.' As with him, so with many, though the many 
feel that their interest is in theology and not in dogma. 
Dogma, they know, is but a series of resolutions 
framed by a council or parliament, which they do 
not respect any the more because the parliament was 
composed of ecclesiastically-minded persons ; while the 
theology which so interests them is a discourse touch- 
ing God, though the Being so named is the God man 
conceived as not only related to himself and his world 
but also as rising ever higher with the notions of the 
self and the world. Wise books, not in dogma but in 
theology, may therefore be described as the supreme 



vi GENERAL INTRODUCTION 

need of our day, for only such can save us from mucb. 
fanaticism and secure us in the full possession of a 
sober and sane reason. 

Theology is less a single science than an ency- 
clopaedia of sciences; indeed all the sciences which 
have to do with man have a better right to be called 
theological than anthropological, though the man it 
studies is not simply an individual but a race. Its 
way of viewing man is indeed characteristic ; from this 
have come some of its brighter ideals and some of its 
darkest dreams. The ideals are all either ethical or 
social, and would make of earth a heaven, creating 
fraternity amongst men and forming all states into a 
goodly sisterhood ; the dreams may be represented by 
doctrines which concern sin on the one side and the 
Avill of God on the other. But even this will cannot 
make sin luminous, for were it made radiant with 
grace, it would cease to be sin. 

These books then, — which have all to be written by 
men who have lived in the full blaze of modern light, 
— though without having either their eyes burned 
out or their souls scorched into insensibility, — are in- 
tended to present God in relation to Man and Man 
in relation to God. It is intended that they begin, not 
in date of publication, but in order of thought, with a 
Theological Encyclopaedia which shall show the circle 
of sciences co-ordinated under the term Theology, 
though all will be viewed as related to its central or 
main idea. This relation of God to human know- 
ledge will then be looked at through mind as a com- 
munion of Deity with humanity, or God in fellowship 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION vii 

with concrete man. On this basis the idea of Revela- 
tion will be dealt with. Then, so far as history and 
philology are concerned, the two Sacred Books, which 
are here most significant, will be viewed as the scholar, 
who is also a divine, views them ; in other words, 
the Old and New Testaments, regarded as human 
documents, will be criticised as a literature which 
expresses relations to both the present and the future ; 
that is, to the men and races who made the books, 
as well as to the races and men the books made. 
The Bible will thus be studied in the Semitic family 
which gave it being, and also in the Indo-European 
families which gave to it the quality of the life to 
which they have attained. But Theology has to do 
with more than sacred literature ; it has also to do 
with the thoughts and life its history occasioned. 
Therefore the Church has to be studied and presented 
as an institution which God founded and man ad- 
ministers. But it is possible to know this Church 
only through the thoughts it thinks, the doctrines 
it holds, the characters and the persons it forms, the 
people who are its saints and embody its ideals of 
sanctity, the acts it does, which are its sacraments, 
and the laws it follows and enforces, which are its 
polity, and the young it educates and the nations it 
directs and controls. These are the points to be pre- 
sented in the volumes which follow, which are all to be 
occupied with theology or the knowledge of God and 
His ways. 

A. M. F. 
•0.' 



PREFACE 

These Lectures were delivered in Cambridge during 
the Lent Term of last year, on the invitation 
of a Committee presided over by the Master of 
Magdalene, before an audience of from three hundred 
to four hundred University men, chiefly Under- 
graduates. They were not then, and they are not 
now, intended for philosophers or even for beginners 
in the systematic study of philosophy, but as aids 
to educated men desirous of thinking out for them- 
selves a reasonable basis for personal Religion. 

The Lectures — especially the first three — deal with 
questions on which I have already written. I am 
indebted to the Publisher of Contentio Veritatis and 
the other contributors to that volume for raising no 
objection to my publishing Lectures which might 
possibly be regarded as in part a condensation, in 
part an expansion of my Essay on ' The ultimate 
basis of Theism.' I have dealt more systematically 
with many of the problems here discussed in an 
Essay upon ' Personality in God and Man ' con- 
tributed to Personal Idealism (edited by Henry 



X PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 

Sturt) and in my ' Theory of Good and Evil/ 
Some of the doctrinal questions touched on in 
Lecture VI. have been more fully dealt with in 
my volume of University Sermons, Doctrine and 
Development. 

Questions which were asked at the time and 
communications which have since reached me have 
made me feel, more even than I did when I was 
writing the Lectures, how inadequate is the treat- 
ment here given to many great problems. On some 
matters much fuller explanation and discussion will 
naturally be required to convince persons previously 
unfamiliar with Metaphysic : on others it is the more 
advanced student of Philosophy who will complain 
that I have only touched upon the fringe of a vast 
subject. But I have felt that I could not seriously 
expand any part of the Lectures without changing 
the whole character of the book, and I have been 
compelled in general to meet the demand for further 
explanation only by the above general reference to 
my other books, by the addition of a few notes, and 
by appending to each chapter some suggestions for 
more extended reading. These might of course 
have been indefinitely enlarged, but a long list of 
books is apt to defeat its own purpose : people with 
a limited time at their disposal want to know which 
book to make a beginning upon. 

The Lectures are therefore published for the most 



PREFACE xi 

part Just as they were delivered, in the hope that 
they may suggest lines of thought which may be 
intellectually and practically useful. I trust that 
any philosopher who may wish to take serious notice 
of my views — especially the metaphysical views 
expressed in the first few chapters — will be good 
enough to remember that the expression of them is 
avowedly incomplete and elementary, and cannot 
fairly be criticized in much detail without reference 
to my other writings. 

I am much indebted for several useful suggestions 
and for valuable assistance in revising the proofs to 
one of the hearers of the Lectures, Mr. A. G. 
Widgery, Scholar of St. Catherine's College, Cam- 
bridge, now Lecturer in University College, Bristol. 



H. Rashdaix. 



New College, Oxford, 
Jan. 6, 1909. 



CONTENTS 
LECTURE I 

PAGE 

MIND AND MATTER, 1 

1. Is Materialism possible ? There is no immediate know- 
ledge of Matter: what we know is always Self + Matter. 
The idea of a Matter which can exist by itself is an inference : 
is it a reasonable one ? 

2. No. For all that we know about Matter implies Mind. 
This is obvious as to secondary qualities (colour, sound, etc.) ; 
but it is no less true of primary qualities (solidity, magni- 
tude, etc. ). Relations, no less than sensations, imply Mind, 8 

3. This is the great discovery of Berkeley, though he did 
not adequately distinguish between sensations and intel- 
lectual relations, . 12 

4. But Matter certainly does not exist merely for our 
transitory and incomplete knowledge : if it cannot exist 
apart from Mind, there must be a universal Mind in which 

and for which all things exist, i.e. God, .... 16 

5. But Theism is possible without Idealism. The im- 
possibility of Materialism has generally been recognized 
[e.g. by Spinoza, Spencer, Haeckel). If the iiltimate Reality 
is not Matter, it must be utterly unlike anything we know, 

or be Mind. The latter view more probable, ... 19 

6. It is more reasonable to explain the lower by the 
higher than vice versd, ........ 26 

LECTURE II 

THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE, 29 

1. We have been led by the idealistic argument to 
recognize the necessity of a Mind which thinks the world. 
Insufliuiency of this view. 



CONTENTS xiii 

PAOB 

2. In our experiences of external Nature we meet with 
nothing but succession, never with Causality. The Uni- 
formity of Nature is a postulate of Physical Science, not 
a necessity of thought. The idea of Causality derived from 

our consciousness of Volition. Causality = Activity, . . 31 

3. If events must have a cause, and we know of no cause 
but Will, it is reasonable to infer that the events which we 
do not cause must be caused by some other Will ; and the 
systematic unity of Nature implies that this cause must be 

One Will, 41 

4. Moreover, the analogy of the human mind suggests the 
probability that, if God is Mind, there must be in Him, as 

in us, the three activities of Thought, Feeling, and Will, . 44 

5. The above line of argument can be used by the Realist 
who believes matter to be a thing-in-itself ; but it fits in 
much better with the Idealistic view of the relations between 
mind and matter, and with the tendency of modern physics 

to resolve matter into Force, 48 

6. Testimony of Spencer and Kant to the theory that the 
Ultimate Reality is Will, 51 

7. Is God a Person? 64 



LECTURE III 

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS, . , . , 58 

1. The empirical study of Nature ('red in tooth and 
claw ') can tell us of purpose, not what the purpose is. The 
only source of knowledge of the character of God is to be 
found in the moral Consciousness. 

2. Our moral judgements are as valid as other judgements 
{i.g. mathematical axioms), and equally reveal the thought 

of God 62 

3. This does not imply that the moral consciousness is not 
gradually evolved, or that each individual's conscience is 
infallible, or that our moral judgements in detail are as cer- 
tain as mathematical judgements, or that the detailed rules 

of human conduct are applicable to God, .... 63 



iv PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 

PAGE 

4. Corollaries: 

(a) Belief in the objectivity of oar moral judgements 

logically implies belief in God, .... 69 

(6) If God aims at an end not fully realized here, we 

have a ground for postulating Immortality, . 77 

(c) Evil must be a necessary means to greater good, . 79 

5. In what sense this 'limits God.' Omnipotence = 
ability to do all things which are in their own nature 
possible, .81 



LECTURE IV 

DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS, 87 

1. Is the world created f There may or may not be a 

beginning of the particular series of physical events 
constituting our world. But, even if this series has a begin- 
ning, this implies some previous existence which has no 
beginning. 

2. Js the whole-time series infi^iitei Time must be 
regarded as objective, but the 'antinomies' involved in 

the nature of Time cannot be resolved, .... 90 

3. Are Spirits created or pre-existent 1 The close con- 
nexion and correspondence between mind and body makes 
for the former view. Difficulties of pre-existence — heredity, 

etc., 93 

i. An Idealism based on Pre-existence without God is open 
to the same objections and others. Such a system provides 
no mind (a) in which and for which the whole system exists, 
or (&) to eflfect the correspondence between mind and body, 
or (c) to allow of a purpose in the Universe : without this 
the world is not rational, 96 

5. The human mind {i.e. consciousness) not a part of the 
divine Consciousness, though in the closest possible depend- 
ence upon God. The Universe a Unity, but the Unity is 

not that of Self-Consciousness, 101 

6. There is no 'immediate' or * intuitive' knowledge of 
Ood. Our knowledge is got by inference, like knowledge of 

our friend's existence, . 106 



CONTENTS IV 

FAOK 

7. Religion and Psychology. It is impossible to base 
Religion upon Psychology or ' religious experience' without 
Metaphysics, Ill 

8. Summary : the ultimate nature of Reality, , . , 118 
Note on Non-theistic Idealism. . . . - . . . 123 



LECTURE V 

EEVELATIOIT, , 127 

1. There is no special organ of religious knowledge, but 
religious knowledge has many characteristics which may be 
conveniently suggested by the use of the term 'faith,' 
especially its connexion with character and Will. 

2. The psychological causes of religious belief must be 
carefully distinguished from the reasons which make it true. 
No logic of discovery. Many religious ideas have occurred 
in a spontaneous or apparently intuitive way to particular 
persons, the truth of which the philosopher may subse- 
quently be able to test by philosophical reflection, though 
he could not have discovered them, but they are not neces- 
sarily true because they arise in a spontaneous or unaccount- 
able manner, 134 

3. False conceptions of Revelation and true. All knowledge 
is in a sense revealed, especially religious and moral know- 
ledge : but spiritual insight varies. Need of the prophet or 
religious genius, 139 

4. Reasoned and intuitive beliefs may both be 'revealed,' 143 

5. Degrees of truth in the historical religions. Depen- 
dence of the individual upon such religions. Christianity 
occupies a unique position, because it alone combines an 
ethical ideal which appeals to the universal Conscience with 
a Theism which commends itself to Reason. The truth of 
Christianity is dependent upon its appeal to the moral and 
religious consciousness of the present, 148 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 



LECTURE VI 

PAOE 
CHRISTIANITY, 157 

1. The claim of Christianity to be the special or absolute 
Eeligion not dependent upon miracles. 

2. Ritschlian Theologians right in resting the truth of 
Christianity mainly upon the appeal made by Christ to 
the individual Conscience : but wrong in disparaging (a) 
philosophical arguments for Theism, (6) the relative truth of 
non-Christian systems, (c) the value of Doctrine and neces- 
sity for Development 161 

3. Christian doctrine (esp. of the Logos) is an attempt to 
express the Church's sense of the unique value of Christ and 
His Revelation. The necessity for recognizing development 
both in Christian Ethics and in Theology, .... 164 

4. Some reflections on our practical attitude towards 
Christian doctrine. Some means of expressing the unique 
position of Christ wanted. The old expressions were in- 
fluenced by philosophy of the time, but not valueless. 
Illustrations. Need of re-interpretation and further de- 
velopment, 168 

5. The doctrine of continuous Revelation through the 
Spirit is a part of Christianity, and the condition of its 
acceptance as the final or absolute Religion, , , . 185 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 
LECTURE I 

MIND AND MATTER 

I HAVE been invited to speak to you about the 
relations between Religion and Philosophy. To do 
that in a logical and thoroughgoing way it would be 
necessary to discuss elaborately the meaning first 
of Religion and then of Philosophy. Such a dis- 
cussion would occupy at least a lecture, and I am 
unwilling to spend one out of six scanty hours in 
formal preliminaries. I shall assume, therefore, that 
we all know in some general way the meaning of 
Religion. It is not necessary for our present pur- 
pose to discuss such questions as the definition of 
Religion for purposes of sociological investigation, 
or the possibility of a Religion without a belief in 
God, or the like. I shall assume that, whatever else 
may be included in the term Religion, Christianity 
may at least be included in it ; and that what you 
are practically most interested in is the bearing of 
Philosophy upon the Christian ideas concerning the 

A 



2 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

being and nature of God, the hope of Immortality, 
the meaning and possibility of Revelation. When 
we turn to Philosophy, I cannot perhaps assume 
with equal confidence that all of you know what it 
is. But then learning what Philosophy is — espe- 
cially that most fundamental part of Philosophy 
which is called Metaphysics — is like learning to swim : 
you never discover how to do it until you find your- 
self considerably out of your depth. You must 
strike out boldly, and at last you discover what you 
are after. I shall presuppose that in a general way 
you do all know that Philosophy is an enquiry into 
the ultimate nature of the Universe at large, as 
opposed to the discussion of those particular aspects 
or departments of it which are dealt with by the 
special Sciences. What you want to know, I take 
it, is — what rational enquiry, pushed as far as it 
will go, has to say about those ultimate problems 
of which the great historical Religions likewise 
profess to offer solutions. The nature and scope 
of Philosophy is best understood by examples : and 
therefore I hope you will excuse me if without 
further preface I plunge in medias res. I shall 
endeavour to presuppose no previous acquaintance 
with technical Philosophy, and I will ask those who 
have already made some serious study of Philosophy 
kindly to remember that I am trying to make 
myself intelligible to those who have not. I shall 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 3 

not advance anything which I should not be pre- 
pared to defend even before an audience of meta- 
physical experts. But I cannot undertake in so 
short a course of lectures to meet all the objections 
which will, I know, be arising in the minds of any 
metaphysically trained hearers who may honour 
me with their presence, many of which may probably 
occur to persons not so trained. And I further 
trust the Metaphysicians among you will forgive 
me if, in order to be intelligible to all, I sometimes 
speak with a little less than the aKpifSna at which 
I might feel bound to aim if I were reading a paper 
before an avowedly philosophical Society. Reserva- 
tions, qualifications, and elaborate distinctions must 
be omitted, if I am to succeed in saying anything 
clearly in the course of six lectures. 

Moreover, I would remark that, though I do not 
believe that an intention to edify is any excuse for 
slipshod thought or intellectual dishonesty, I am 
speaking now mainly from the point of view of 
those who are enquiring into metaphysical truth 
for the guidance of their OAvn religious and practical 
life, rather than from the point of view of pure 
speculation. I do not, for my own part, believe in 
any solution of the religious problem which evades 
the ultimate problems of all thought. The Philo- 
sophy of Religion is for me not so much a special 
and sharply distinguished branch or department of 



4 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [leot. 

Philosophy as a particular aspect of Philosophy in 
general. But many questions which may be of much 
importance from the point of view of a complete 
theory of the Universe can be entirely, or almost 
entirely, put on one side when the question is, 
' What may I reasonably believe about those ulti- 
mate questions which have a direct and immediate 
bearing upon my religious and moral life ; what may 
I believe about God and Duty, about the world and 
its ultimate meaning, about the soul and its destiny ? ' 
For such purposes solutions stopping short of what 
will fully satisfy the legitimate demands of the 
professed Metaphysician may be all that is neces- 
sary, or at least all that is possible for those who 
are not intending to make a serious and elaborate 
study of Metaphysic. I have no sympathy with 
the attempt to base Religion upon anything but 
honest enquiry into truth : and yet the professed 
Philosophers are just those who will most readily 
recognize that there are — if not what are technically 
called degrees of truth — still different levels of 
thought, different degrees of adequacy and systematic 
completeness, even within the limits of thoroughly 
philosophical thinking. I shall assume that you are 
not content to remain at the level of ordinary un- 
reflecting Common-sense or of merely traditional 
Religion — that you do want (so far as time and 
opportunity serve) to get to the bottom of things, 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 6 

but that you will be content in such a course as the 
present if I can suggest to you, or help you to form 
for yourselves, an outline — what Plato would call 
the vTroTvirwo-i? of a theory of the Universe which 
may still fall very far short of a finished and fully 
articulated metaphysical system. 

I suppose that to nearly everybody who sets him- 
self down to think seriously about the riddle of the 
Universe there very soon occurs the question whether 
Materialism may not contain the solution of all 
difficulties. I think, therefore, our present investiga- 
tion had better begin with an enquiry whether 
Materialism can possibly be true. I say ' can be 
true ' rather than ' is true,' because, though dogmatic 
Materialists are rare, the typical Agnostic is one 
who is at least inclined to admit the possibility of 
Materialism, even when he does not, at the bottom 
of his mind, practically assume its truth. The man 
who is prepared to exclude even this one theory of 
the Universe from the category of possible but 
unprovable theories is not, properly speaking, an 
Agnostic. To know that Materialism at least is not 
true is to know something, and something very 
important, about the ultimate nature of things. I 
shall not attempt here any very precise definition 
of what is meant by Materialism. Strictly speaking, 
it ought to mean the view that nothing really exists 
but matter. But the existence, in some sense or 



6 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

other, of our sensations and thoughts and emotions 
is so obvious to Common- sense that such a creed 
can hardly be expHcitly maintained : it is a 
creed which is refuted in the very act of enunciating 
it. For practical purposes, therefore, Materialism 
may be said to be the view that the ultimate basis 
of all existence is matter ; and that thought, feeling, 
emotion — consciousness of every kind — is merely an 
effect, a by-product or concomitant, of certain 
material processes. 

Now if we are to hold that matter is the only thing 
which exists, or is the ultimate source of all that 
exists, we ought to be able to say what matter is. 
To the unreflecting mind matter seems to be the 
thing that we are most certain of, the one thing tbat 
we know all about. Thought, feeling, will, it may 
be suggested, are in some sense appearances which 
(though we can't help having them) might, from the 
point of view of superior insight, turn out to be mere 
delnsions, or at best entirely unimportant and in- 
considerable entities. This attitude of mind has 
been amusiagly satirised by the title of one of Mr. 
Bradley's philosophical essays — ' on the supposed 
uselessness of the Soul.' ^ In this state of mind 
matter presents itself as the one solid reality — as 
something undeniable, something perfectly intel- 
ligible, something, too, which is pre-eminently 
1 Mind, vol. iv. (N.S.), 1895. 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 7 

important and respectable ; while thinking and feel- 
ing and willing, joy and sorrow, hope and aspiration, 
goodness and badness, if they cannot exactly be got 
rid of altogether, are, as it were, negligible quantities, 
which must not be allowed to disturb or interfere 
with the serious business of the Universe. 

From this point of view matter is supposed to be 
the one reality with which we are in immediate 
contact, which we see and touch and taste and 
handle every hour of our lives. It may, therefore, 
sound a rather startling paradox to say that matter 
— matter in the sense of the Materiahst — is some- 
thing which nobody has ever seen, touched, or 
handled. Yet that is the literal and undeniable 
fact. Nobody has ever seen or touched or other- 
wise come in contact with a piece of matter. For 
in the experience which the plain man calls seeing 
or touching there is always present another thing. 
Even if we suppose that he is justified in saying ' I 
touch matter,' there is always present the ' I ' as 
well as the matter.^ It is always and inevitably 
matter -|- mind that he knows. Nobody ever can 
get away from this 'I,' nobody can ever see or feel 
what matter is like apart from the ' I ' which knows 

1 I do not mean of course that in the earliest stages of conscious- 
ness this distinction is actually made ; but, if there are stages of con- 
sciousness in which the ' I ' is not realized, the idea of matter or 
even of an 'object' or 'not-self existing apart from consciousness 
must be supposed to be equally absent. 



8 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

it. He may, indeed, infer that this matter exists 
apart from the ' I ' which knows it. He may infer 
that it exists, and may even go as far as to assume 
that, apart from his seeing or touching, or anybody 
else's seeing or touching, matter possesses all those 
qualities which it possesses for his own consciousness. 
But this is inference, and not immediate knowledge. 
And the validity or reasonableness of the inference 
may be disputed. How far it is reasonable or 
legitimate to attribute to matter as it is in itself 
the qualities which it has for us must depend upon 
the nature of those qualities. Let us then go on to 
ask whether the qualities which constitute matter 
as we know it are qualities which we can reasonably 
or even intelligibly attribute to a supposed matter- 
in-itself, to matter considered as something capable 
of existing by itself altogether apart from any 
kind of conscious experience. 

In matter, as we know it, there are two elements. 
There are certain sensations, or certain qualities 
which we come to know by sensation, and there are 
certain relations. Now, with regard to the sensa- 
tions, a very little reflection will, I think, show us 
that it is absolutely meaningless to say that matter 
has the qualities implied by these sensations, even 
when they are not felt, and would still possess them, 
even supposing it never had been and never woud 
be felt by any one whatever. In a world in which 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 9 

there were no eyes and no minds, what would be 
the meaning of saying that things were red or blue ? 
In a world in which there were no ears and no minds, 
there would clearly be no such thing as sound. This 
is exactly the point at which Locke's analysis stopped. 
He admitted that the ' secondary qualities ' — colours, 
sounds, tastes — of objects were really not in the 
things themselves but in the mind which perceives 
them. What existed in the things was merely 
a power of producing these sensations in us, the 
quality in the thing being not in the least like the 
sensations which it produces in us : he admitted 
that this power of producing a sensation was some- 
thing different from, and totally unlike, the sensation 
itself. But when he came to the primary qualities — 
solidity, shape, magnitude and the like — he supposed 
that the qualities in the thing were exactly the same 
as they are for our minds. If all mind were to 
disappear from the Universe, there would henceforth 
be no red and blue, no hot and cold ; but things would 
still be big or small, round or square, solid or tluid. 
Yet, even with these ' primary quaUties ' the refer- 
ence to mind is really there just as much as in the 
case of the secondary qualities ; only the fact is not 
quite so obvious. And one reason for this is that 
these primary qualities involve, much more glaringly 
and unmistakably than the secondary, something 
which is not mere sensation — sometning whicn 



10 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

implies thought and not mere sense. What do we 
mean by solidity, for instance ? We mean partly 
that we get certain sensations from touching the 
object — sensations of touch and sensations of what 
is called the muscular sense, sensations of muscular 
exertion and of pressure resisted. Now, so far as 
that is what solidity means, it is clear that the 
quality in question involves as direct a reference to 
our subjective feelings as the secondary qualities of 
colour and sound. But something more than this 
is imphed in our idea of solidity. We think of 
external objects as occupying space. And spaciality 
cannot be analysed away into mere feelings of ours. 
The feelings of touch which we derive from an object 
come to us one after the other. No mental reflection 
upon sensations which come one after the other in 
time could ever give us the idea of space, if they were 
not spacially related from the first. It is of the 
essence of spaciality that the parts of the object 
shall be thought of as existing side by side, outside 
one another. But this side-by-sideness, this out- 
sideness, is after all a way in which the things present 
themselves to a mind. Space is made up of relations ; 
and what is the meaning of relations apart from a 
mind which relates, or for which the things are 
related ? If spaciality were a quality of the thing 
in itself, it would exist no matter what became of 
other things. It would be quite possible, therefore, 



I.] MIND AND MATTEE 11 

that the top of this table should exist without the 
bottom : yet everybody surely would admit the 
meaninglessness of talking about a piece of matter 
(no matter how small, be it an atom or the smallest 
electron conceived by the most recent physical 
speculation) which had a top without a bottom, or 
a right-hand side without a left. This space- 
occupying quality which is the most fundamental 
'element in our ordinary conception of matter is 
wholly made up of the relation of one part of it to 
another. Now can a relation exist except for a 
mind ? As it seems to me, the suggestion is meaning- 
less. Relatedness only has a meaning when thought 
of in connection with a mind which is capable of 
grasping or holding together both terms of the 
relation. The relation between point A and point 
B is not in point A or in point B taken by them- 
selves. It is all in the ' between ' : ' betweenness ' 
from its very nature carmot exist in any one point 
of space or in several isolated points of space or things 
in space ; it must exist only in some one existent 
which holds together and connects those points. 
And nothing, as far as we can understand, can do 
that except a mind. Apart from mind there can 
be no relatedness : apart from relatedness no space : 
apart from space no matter. It follows that apart 
from mind there can be no matter. 

It will probably be known to all of you that the 



12 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

first person to make this momentous inference was 
Bishop Berkeley. There was, indeed, an obscure 
medieval schoolman, hardly recognized by the 
historians of Philosophy, one Nicholas of Autrecourt, 
Dean of Metz,^ who anticipated him in the fourteenth 
century, and other better-known schoolmen who 
approximated to the position ; and there are, of 
course, elements in the teaching of Plato and even 
of Aristotle, or possible interpretations of Plato and 
Aristotle, which point in the same direction. But 
full-blown Idealism, in the sense which involves a 
denial of the independent existence of matter, is al- 
ways associated with the name of Bishop Berkeley. 

I can best make my meaning plain to you by 
quoting a passage or two from his Principles of 
Human Knowledge, in which he extends to the 
primary qualities of matter the analysis which Locke 
had already applied to the secondary. 

' But, though it -were possible that solid, figured, move- 
able substances may exist without the mind, correspond- 
ing to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it possible 
for us to know this ? Either we must know it by Sense 
or by Reason. — As for our senses, by them we have the 
knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things 
that are immediately perceived by sense, call them what 
you will : but they do not inform us that things exist 

1 I have dealt at length with this forgotten thinker in a Presidential 
Address to the Aristotelian Society, printed in their Proceedings for 
1907. 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 13 

without the mind, or unperceived, like to those which 
are perceived. This the Materialists themselves acknow- 
ledge. — It remains therefore that if we have any know- 
ledge at all of external things, it must be by Reason 
inferring their existence from what is immediately per- 
ceived by sense. But what reason can induce us to 
believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from 
what we perceive, since the very patrons of Matter 
themselves do not pretend there is any necessary con- 
nexion betwixt them and our ideas ? I say it is granted 
on all hands — and what happens in dreams, frenzies, 
and the like, puts it beyond dispute — that it is possible 
we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, 
though there were no bodies existing without resembling 
them. Hence, it is evident the supposition of external 
bodies is not necessary for the producing our ideas ; 
since it is granted they are produced sometimes, and 
might possibly be produced always in the same order we 
see them in at present, without their concurrence. 

* In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible 
we should ever come to know it ; and if there were not, 
we might have the very same reasons to think there were 
that we have now. Suppose — what no one can deny 
possible — an intelligence without the help of external 
bodies, to be affected with the same train of sensations or 
ideas that you are, imprinted in the same order and with 
like vividness in his mind. I ask whether that intelli- 
gence hath not aU the reason to believe the existence of 
corporeal substances, represented by his ideas, and 
exciting them in his mind, that you can possibly have for 
believing the same thing] Of this there can be no 



14 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

question — which one consideration were enough to make 
any reasonable person suspect the strength of whatever 
arguments he may think himself to have, for the exist- 
ence of bodies without the mind.' ^ 

Do you say that in that case the tables and chairs 
must be supposed to disappear the moment we all 
leave the room ? It is true that we do commonly 
think of the tables and chairs as remaining, even 
when there is no one there to see or touch them. 
But that only means, Berkeley explains, that if we 
or any one else were to come back into the room, 
we should perceive them. Moreover, even in think- 
ing of them as things which might be perceived 
under certain conditions, they have entered our 
minds and so proclaimed their ideal or mind-implying 
character. To prove that things exist without the 
mind we should have to conceive of things as un- 
conceived or imthought of. And that is a feat 
which no one has ever yet succeeded in accom- 
plishing. 

Here is Berkeley's own answer to the objection : 

* But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for 
me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books 
existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I 
answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but 
what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your 
mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and 

» Principles of Human Knowledge, pt. i., §§ 18, 20. 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 15 

at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one 
that may perceive them ? But do not you yourself per- 
ceive or think of them all the while 1 This therefore is 
nothing to the purpose : it only shews you have the 
power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind ; but 
it does not shew that you can conceive it possible the 
objects of your thought may exist without the mind. 
To make out this, it is necessary that i/ou conceive them 
existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a mani- 
fest repugnancy. When we do our utmost to conceive 
the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only 
contemplating our own ideas. But the mind, taking no 
notice ofitse^, is deluded to think it can and does con- 
ceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind, 
though at the same time they are apprehended by, or 
exist in, itself. A little attention will discover to any one 
the truth and evidence of what is here said, and make it 
unnecessary to insist on any other proofs against the 
existence of material substance.' ^ 

Berkeley no doubt did not adequately appreciate 
the importance of the distinction between mere 
sensations and mental relations. In the paragraph 
which I have read to you he tends to explain space 
away into mere subjective feelings : in this respect 
and in many others he has been corrected by Kant 
and the post-Kantian Idealists. Doubtless we 
cannot analyse away our conception of space or of 
substance into mere feelings. But relations imply 
mind no less than sensations. Things are no mere 
1 Principles of Human Knowledge, pt. i., §23. 



16 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

bundles of sensations ; we do think of them as 
objects or substances possessing attributes. Indeed 
to call them (with Berkeley), ' bimdles of sensations ' 
implies that the bundle is as important an element 
in thinghood as the sensations themselves. The 
bundle implies what Kant would call the intellectual 
' categories ' of Substance, Quantity, Quality, and 
the like. We do think objects : but an object is 
still an object of thought. We can attach no intel- 
ligible meaning to the term 'object ' which does not 
imply a subject. 

If there is nothing in matter, as we know it, which 
does not obviously imply mind, if the very idea of 
matter is unintelligible apart from mind, it is clear 
that matter can never have existed without mind. 

What then, it may be asked, of the things which 
no human eye has ever seen or even thought of ? 
Are we to suppose that a new planet comes into 
existence for the first time when first it sails into the 
telescope of the astronomer, and that Science is 
wrong in inferring that it existed not only before 
that particular astronomer saw it, but before there 
were any astronomers or other human or even animal 
intelligences upon this planet to observe it ? Did 
the world of Geology come into existence for the 
first time when some eighteenth-century geologist 
first suspected that the world was more than six 
thousand years old ? Are all those ages of past 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 17 

history, when the earth and the sun were but nebulae, 
a mere imagination, or did that nebulous mass come 
into existence thousands or millions of years after- 
wards when Kant or Laplace first conceived that 
it had existed ? The supposition is clearly self- 
contradictory and impossible. If Science be not 
a mass of illusion, this planet existed millions of 
years before any human — or, so far as we know, 
any animal minds — existed to think its existence. 
And yet I have endeavoured to show the absurdity 
of supposing that matter can exist except for a mind. 
It is clear, then, that it cannot be merely for such 
minds as ours that the world has always existed. 
Our minds come and go. They have a beginning ; 
they go to sleep ; they may, for aught that we can 
immediately know, come to an end. At no time does 
any one of them, at no time do all of them together, 
apprehend all that there is to be known. We do not 
create a Universe ; we discover it piece by piece, 
and after all very imperfectly. Matter cannot 
intelligibly be supposed to exist apart from Mind : 
and yet it clearly does not exist merely for our minds. 
Each of us knows only one little bit of the Universe : 
all of us together do not know the whole. If the 
whole is to exist at all, there must be some one mind 
which knows the whole. The mind which is neces- 
sary to the very existence of the Universe is the 
mind that we call God. 

B 



18 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

In this way we are, as it seems to me, led up by 
a train of reasoning which is positively irresistible 
to the idea that, so far from matter being the only 
existence, it has no existence of its own apart from 
some mind which knows it — in which and for which 
it exists. The existence of a Mind possessing 
universal knowledge is necessary as the presupposi- 
tion both of there being any world to know, and 
also of there being any lesser minds to know it. 
It is, indeed, possible to believe in the eternal exist- 
ence of limited minds, while denying the existence 
of the one Omniscient Mind. That is a hypothesis 
on which I will say a word hereafter.^ It is enough 
here to say that it is one which is not required to 
explain the world as we know it. The obvious 
prima facie view of the matter is that the minds 
which apparently have a beginning, which develope 
slowly and gradually and in close connexion with 
certain physical processes, owe their origin to what- 
ever is the ultimate source or ground of the physical 
processes themselves. The order or systematic 
interconnexion of all the observable phenomena 
in the Universe suggests that the ultimate Reality 
must be one Being of some kind ; the argument 
which I have suggested leads us to regard that one 
Reality as a spiritual Reality. We are not yet 
entitled to speak of this physical Universe as caused 
1 See Lecture IV., pp. 96-101, 123-6. 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 19 

by God : that is a question which I hope to discuss 
in our next lecture. All that I want to establish 
now is that we cannot explain the world without the 
supposition of one universal Mind in which and for 
which all so-called material things exist, and always 
have existed. 

So far I have endeavoured to establish the exist- 
ence of God by a line of thought which also leads to 
the position that matter has no independent exist- 
ence apart from conscious mind, that at bottom 
nothing exists except minds and their experiences. 
Now I know that this is a line of thought which, to 
those who are unfamiliar with it, seems so para- 
doxical and extravagant that, even when a man 
does not see his way to reply to it, it will seldom 
produce immediate or permanent conviction the 
first time he becomes acquainted with it. It is for 
the most part only by a considerable course of 
habituation, extending over some years, that a man 
succeeds in thinking himself into the idealistic view 
of the Universe. And after all, there are many 
minds — some of them, I must admit, not wanting 
in philosophical power — who never succeed in 
accomplishing that feat at all. Therefore, while I 
feel bound to assert that the clearest and most irre- 
fragable argument for the existence of God is that 
which is supplied by the idealistic line of thought, 
I should be sorry to have to admit that a man 



20 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lbct. 

cannot be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist 
on reasonable grounds, without first being an IdeaHst. 
From my own point of view most of the other reasons 
for beheving in the existence of God resolve them- 
selves into idealistic arguments imperfectly thought 
out. But they may be very good arguments, as far 
as they go, even when they are not thought out to 
what seem to me their logical consequences. One 
of these lines of thought I shall hope to develope in 
my next lecture ; but meanwhile let me attempt 
to reduce the argument against Materialism to a 
form in which it will perhaps appeal to Common- 
sense without much profound metaphysical reflec- 
tion. 

At the level of ordinary common-sense thought 
there appear to be two kinds of Reality — mind and 
matter. And yet our experience of the unity of 
Nature, of the intimate connexion between human 
and animal minds and their organisms (organisms 
governed by a single intelligible and interconnected 
system of laws) is such that we can hardly help 
regarding them as manifestations or products or 
effects or aspects of some one Reality. There is, 
almost obviously, some kind of Unity underlying 
all the diversity of things. Our world does not 
arise by the coming together of two quite independent 
Realities — mind and matter — governed by no law 
or by unconnected and independent systems of law. 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 21 

All things, all phenomena, all events form parts of 
a single inter-related, intelligible whole : that is the 
presupposition not only of Philosophy but of Science. 
Or if any one chooses to say that it is a presupposi- 
tion and so an unwarrantable piece of dogmatism, 
I will say that it is the h3rpothesis to which all our 
knowledge points. It is at all events the one 
common meeting-point of nearly all serious thinkers. 
The question remains, ' What is the nature of this 
one Reality ? ' Now, if this ultimate Reality be 
not mind, it must be one of two things. It must 
be matter, or it must be a third thing which is neither 
mind nor matter, but something quite different from 
either. Now many who will not follow the idealistic 
line of thought the whole way — so far as to recognize 
that the ultimate ReaHty is Mind — will at least 
admit that Idealists have successfully shown the 
impossibility of supposing that the ultimate Reality 
can be matter. For all the properties of matter 
are properties which imply some relation to our 
sensibility or our thought. Moreover, there is such 
a complete heterogeneity between consciousness 
and unconscious matter, considered as something 
capable of existing without mind, that it seems 
utterly impossible and unthinkable that mind should 
be simply the product or attribute of matter. That 
the ultimate Reality cannot be what we mean by 
matter has been admitted by the most naturalistic, 



22 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

and, in the ordinary sense, anti-religious thinkers — 
Spinoza, for instance, and Haeckel, and Herbert 
Spencer. The question remains, ' Which is the 
easier, the more probable, the more reasonable 
theory — that the ultimate Reality should be Mind, 
or that it should be something so utterly unintelligible 
and inconceivable to us as a tertium quid — a mys- 
terious Unknown and Unknowable — which is neither 
mind nor matter ? ' For my own part, I see no 
reason to suppose that our inability to think of any- 
thing which is neither matter nor mind but quite 
unlike either is a mere imperfection of human 
thought. It seems more reasonable to assume that 
our inability to think of such a mysterious X is 
due to there being no such thing. ^ 

Our only way of judging of the Unknown is by 
the analogy of the known. It is more probable, 
surely, that the world known to us should exhibit 
something of the characteristics of the Reality from 
which it is derived, or of which it forms a manifes- 
tation, than that it should exhibit none of these 
characteristics. No doubt, if we were to argue from 
some small part of our experience, or from the 
detailed characteristics of one part of our experience 
to what is beyond our experience ; if, for instance 

1 I have attempted to meet this line of argument somewhat more 
adequately, in the form in which it has recently been taken up by 
Professor Hofifding in his Philosophy of Religion, in a review in the 
Review of Theology and Philosophy for November, 1907 (vol. iii.). 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 23 

(I am here replying to an objection of Hoffding's), 
a blind man were to argue that the world must be 
colourless because he sees no colour, or if any of us 
were to affirm that in other planets there can be no 
colours but what we see, no sensations but what we 
feel, no mental powers but what we possess, the 
inference would be precarious enough. The Anthropo- 
morphist in the strict sense — the man who thinks 
that God or the gods must have human bodies — no 
doubt renders himself liable to the gibe that, if oxen 
could think, they would imagine the gods to be like 
oxen, and so on. But the cases are not parallel. 
We have no difficulty in thinking that in other worlds 
there may be colours which we have never seen, or 
whole groups of sensation different from our own : 
we cannot think that any existence should be neither 
mind nor matter, but utterly unlike either. We are 
not arguing from the mere absence of some special 
experience, but from the whole character of all the 
thought and experience that we actually possess, of 
all that we are and the whole Universe with which 
we are in contact. The characteristic of the whole 
world which we know is that it consists of mind 
and matter in close connexion — we may waive for 
a moment the nature of that connexion. Is it 
more probable that the ultimate Reality which lies 
beyond our reach should be something which pos- 
sesses the characteristics of mind, or that it should 



24 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

be totally unlike either mind or matter ? Do you 
insist that we logically ought to say it might contain 
the characteristics of both mind and matter ? There 
is only one way in which such a combination seems 
clearly thinkable by us, i.e. when we represent 
matter as either in the idealistic sense the thought 
or experience of mind, or (after the fashion of 
ordinary realistic Theism) as created or produced 
by mind. But if you insist on something more than 
this, if you want to think of the qualities of matter 
as in some other way included in the nature of the 
ultimate Reality as well as those of mind, at all 
events we could still urge that we shall get nearer to 
the truth by thinking of this ultimate Reality in its 
mind-aspect than by thinking of it in its matter- 
aspect. 

I do not believe that the human mind is really 
equal to the task of thinking of a Reality which is 
one and yet is neither mind nor matter but some- 
thing which combines the nature of both. Practi- 
cally, where such a creed is professed, the man either 
thinks of an unconscious Reality in some way 
generating or evolving mind, and so falls back into 
the Materialism which he has verbally disclaimed ; 
or he thinks of a mind producing or causing or 
generating a matter which when produced is some- 
thing different from itself. This last is of course 
ordinary Theism in the form in which it is commonly 



1.] MIND AND MATTER 25 

held by those who are not Idealists. From a 
practical and religious point of view there is nothing 
to be said against such a view. Still it involves a 
Dualism, the philosophical difficulties of which I 
have attempted to suggest to you. I confess that 
for my own part the only way in which I can con- 
ceive of a single ultimate Reality which combines 
the attributes of what we call mind with those of 
what we know as matter is by thinking of a Mind 
conscious of a world or nature which has no exist- 
ence except in and for that Mind and whatever 
less complete consciousnesses that may be. I trust 
that those who have failed to follow my sketch of 
the arguments which lead to this idealistic con- 
clusion may at least be led by it to see the diffi- 
culties either of Materialism or of that kind of 
agnostic Pantheism which, while admitting in words 
that the ultimate Reality is not matter, refuses to 
invest it with the attributes of mind. The argu- 
ment may be reduced to its simplest form by saying 
we believe that the ultimate Reality is Mind because 
mind will explain matter, while matter will not 
explain mind : while the idea of a Something which 
is neither in mind nor matter is both unintelligible 
and gratuitous. 

And this line of thought may be supplemented by 
another. Whatever may be thought of the exist- 
ence of matter apart from mind, every one will 



26 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

admit that matter possesses no value or worth apart 
from mind. When we bring into account our moral 
judgements or judgements of value, we have no diffi- 
culty in recognizing mind as the highest or best 
kind of existence known to us. There is, surely, a 
certain intrinsic probability in supposing that the 
Reality from which all being is derived must possess 
at least as much worth or value as the derived being ; 
and that in thinking of that Reality by the analogy 
of the highest kind of existence known to us we shall 
come nearer to a true thought of it than by any other 
way of thinking possible to us. This is a line of argu- 
ment which I hope to develope further when I come 
to examine the bearing upon the religious problem 
of what is as real a part of our experience as any 
other — our moral experience. 

I will remind you in conclusion, that our argument 
for the existence of God is at present incomplete. 
I have tried to lead you to the idea that the ultimate 
Reality is spiritual, that it is a Mind which knows, 
or is conscious of, matter. I have tried to lead you 
with the Ideahst to think of the physical Universe 
as having no existence except in the mind of God, 
or at all events (for those who fail to follow the 
idealistic line of thought) to believe that the Universe 
does not exist without such a Mind. What further 
relation exists between physical nature and this 
Universal Spirit, I shall hope in the next lecture 



I.] MIND AND MATTER 27 

to consider ; and in so doing to suggest a line of 
argument which will independently lead to the same 
result, and which does not necessarily presuppose 
the acceptance of the idealistic creed. 



LITERATURE 

The reader who wishes to have the idealistic argument 
sketched in the foregoing chapter developed more fully 
should read Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. 
For the correction of Berkeley's sensationalistic mistakes the 
best course is to read Kant's Critique of Pure Eeason or the 
shorter Prolegomena to any future Metaphysic or any of the 
numerous expositions or commentaries upon Kant. (One 
of the best is the 'Reproduction' prefixed to Dr. Hutchison 
Stirling's Text-book to Kant.) The non-metaphysical reader 
should, however, be informed that Kant is very hard reading, 
and is scarcely intelligible without some slight knowledge of the 
previous history of Philosophy, especially of Locke, Berkeley, 
and Hume, while some acquaintance with elementary Logic is 
also desirable. He wUl find the argument for non-sensa- 
tionalistic Idealism re-stated in a post-Kantian but much 
easier form in Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic. The argu- 
ment for a theistic Idealism is powerfully stated (though it is 
not easy reading) in the late Prof. T. H. Green's Prolegomena 
to Ethics, Book i. In view of recent realistic revivals I may 
add that the earlier chapters of Mr. Bradley's Appearance 
and Reality still seem to me to contain an unanswerable 
defence of Idealism as against Materialism or any form of 
Realisim, though his Idealism is not of the theistic type 
defended in the above lecture. The idealistic argument is 
stated in a way which makes strongly for Theism by Professor 
Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism— & work which would 
perhaps be the best sequel to these lectures for any reader 



28 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

who does not want to undertake a whole course of 
philosophical reading : readers entirely unacquainted with 
Physical Science might do well to begin with Part ii. A 
naore elementary and very clear defence of Theism from the 
idealistic point of view is to be found in Dr. lUingworth's 
Personality Human and Divine. Representatives of non- 
idealistic Theism will be mentioned at the end of the next 
lecture. 



11.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 



LECTURE II 

THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 

In my last lecture I endeavoured to show that 
matter, so far from constituting the ultimate Reality, 
cannot reasonably be thought of as existing at all 
without mind ; and that we cannot explain the 
world without assuming the existence of a Mind in 
which and for which everything that is not mind has 
its being. But we are still very far from having 
fully cleared up the relation between the divine 
Mind and that Nature which exists in it and for it : 
while we have hardly dealt at all with the relation 
between the universal Mind and those lesser minds 
which we have treated — so far without much argu- 
ment — as in some way derived from, or dependent 
upon, that Mind. So far as our previous line of argu- 
ment goes, we might have to look upon the world 
as the thought of God, but not as caused by Him or 
due to His will. We might speak of God as ' making 
Nature,' but only in the sense in which you or I 
make Nature when we think it or experience it. 



30 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

' The world is as necessary to God as God is to the 
world,' we are often told — for instance by my own 
revered teacher, the late Professor Green. How 
unsatisfactory this position is from a religious point 
of view I need hardly insist. For all that such a 
theory has to say to the contrary, we might have 
to suppose that, though God is perfectly good, the 
world which He is compelled to think is very bad, 
and going from bad to worse. To think of God 
merely as the Mind which eternally contemplates 
Nature, without having any power whatever of 
determining what sort of Nature it is to be, supplies 
no ground for hope or aspiration — still less for wor- 
ship, adoration, imitation. I suggested the possi- 
bility that from such a point of view God might be 
thought of as good, and the world as bad. But 
that is really to concede too much. A being without 
a will could as little be bad as he could be good : 
he would be simply a being without a character. 
From an intellectual point such a way of look- 
ing at the Universe might be more intelligent or 
intelligible than that of pure Materialism or pure 
Agnosticism ; but morally and religiously I don't 
know that, when its consequences are fully realized, 
it is any great improvement upon either of them.^ 

1 Of course deeply religious men like Green who have held this 
view did not admit, or did not realize, such consequences. The 
tendency here criticized is undoubtedly derived from Hegel, but 
passages suggestive of the opposite view can be extracted from his 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 81 

Moreover, even intellectually it fails to satisfy the 
demand which most reflecting people feel, that the 
world shall be regarded as a Unity of some kind. If 
God is thought of as linked by some inexplicable fate 
to a Nature over which He has no sort of control — 
not so much control as a mere human being who 
can produce limited changes in the world, — we can 
hardly be said to have reduced the world to a Unity. 
The old Dualism has broken out again : after all 
we still have God and the world confronting one 
another ; neither of them is in any way explained by 
the other. Still less could such a world be supposed 
to have a purpose or rational end. For our own 
mere intellectual satisfaction as well as for the 
satisfaction of our religious needs we must go on to 
ask whether we are not justified in thinking of God 
as the Cause or Creator of the world, as well as the 
Thinker of it. 

This enquiry introduces us to the whole problem 
of Causality. The sketch which I gave you last 
time of Bishop Berkeley's argument was a very 
imperfect one. Bishop Berkeley was from one 
point of view a great philosophic iconoclast, though 
he destroyed only that he might build up. He 
destroyed the superstition of a self-existing matter : 

writings, e.g. : 'God, however, as subjective Power, is not simply 
will, intention, etc., but rather immediate Cause' {Philosophy of 
Religion, Eng. trans., ii. p. 129). 



32 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

he also waged war against what I will venture to call 
the kindred superstition of a mysterious causal 
nexus between the physical antecedent and the 
physical consequent. On this side his work was 
carried on by Hume. Berkeley resolved our know- 
ledge into a succession of ' ideas.' He did, no doubt, 
fall into the mistake of treating our knowledge as if 
it were a mere succession of feelings : he ignored 
far too much — though he did not do so completely — 
that other element in our knowledge, the element 
of intellectual relation, of which I said something 
last time. Here, no doubt, Berkeley has been 
corrected by Kant ; and, so far, practically all 
modem Idealists will own their indebtedness to 
Kant. Even in the apprehension of a succession of 
ideas, in the mere recognition that this feeling comes 
after that, there is an element which cannot be 
explained by mere feeling. The apprehension that 
this feeling came after that feeling is not itself a 
feeling. But can I detect any relation between 
these experiences of mine except that of succession ? 
We commonly speak of fire as the cause of the 
melting of the wax, but what do we really know 
about the matter ? Surely on reflection we must 
admit that we know nothing but this — that, so far 
as our experience goes, the application of fire is 
always followed by the melting of the wax. Where 
this is the case we do, from the point of view of 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 33 

ordinary life, speak of the one phenomenon as the 
cause of the other. Where we don't discover such 
an invariable succession, we don't think of the one 
event as the cause of the other. 

I shall be told, perhaps, that on this view of the 
nature of Causality we ought to speak of night as 
the cause of day. So perhaps we should, if the result 
to which we are led by a more limited experience 
were not corrected by the results of a larger experi- 
ence. To say nothing of the valuable correction 
afforded by the polar winter and the polar summer, 
we have learned by a more comprehensive experience 
to replace the law that day follows night by the 
wider generalisation that the visibility of objects 
is invariably coincident upon the presence of some 
luminous body and not upon a previous state of 
darkness. But between cases of what we call mere 
succession and what is commonly called causal 
sequence the difference lies merely in the observed 
fact that in some cases the sequence varies, while in 
others no exception has ever been discovered. No 
matter how frequently we observe that a sensation 
of red follows the impact upon the aural nerve of 
a shock derived from a wave of ether of such and 
such a length, we see no reason why it should do so. 
We may, no doubt, make a still wider generalization, 
and say that every event in Nature is invariably 
preceded by some definite complex of conditions, 

C 



34 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

and so arrive at a general law of the Uniformity of 
Nature. And such a law is undoubtedly the express or 
implied basis of all inference in the Physical Sciences. 
When we have once accepted that law (as the whole 
mass of our experience in the purely physical region 
inclines us to do), then a single instance of A B C 
being followed by D (when we are quite sure that 
we have included all the antecedents which we do 
not know from other experience to be irrelevant) 
will warrant our concluding that we have discovered 
a law of nature. On the next occasion of A B C's 
occurrence we confidently predict that D will follow. 
But, however often we have observed such a sequence, 
and however many similar sequences we may have 
observed, we are no nearer to knowing why D should 
follow ABC: we can only know that it always 
does : and on the strength of that knowledge we 
infer, with a probability which we do no doubt for 
practical purposes treat as a certainty, that it always 
will. But on reflection we can see no reason why 
a wave of ether of a certain length should produce 
red rather than blue, a colour rather than a sound. 
There, as always, we discover nothing but succession, 
not necessary connexion 

These cases of unvaried succession among phe- 
nomena, it should be observed, are quite different 
from cases of real necessary connexion. We don't 
want to examine thousands of instances of two 



ir.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 35 

added to two to be quite sure that they always 
make four, nor in making the inference do we 
appeal to any more general law of Uniformity. We 
simply see that it is and always must be so. Mill 
no doubt tells us he has no difficulty in supposing 
that in the region of the fixed stars two and two 
might make five, but nobody believes him. At all 
events few of us can pretend to such feats of intel- 
lectual elasticity. No amount of contradictory 
testimony from travellers to the fixed stars, no 
matter whether they were Bishops of the highest 
character or trained as Professors of physical Science, 
would induce us to give a moment's credence to such 
a story. We simply see that two and two must 
make four, and that it is inconceivable they should 
ever, however exceptionally, make five. It is quite 
otherwise with any case of succession among external 
phenomena, no matter how unvaried. So long as we 
confine ourselves to merely physical phenomena (I 
put aside for the moment the case of conscious or 
other living beings) nowhere can we discover any- 
thing but succession ; nowhere do we discover 
Causality in the sense of a necessary connexion 
the reversal of which is inconceivable. 

Are we then to conclude that there is no such 
thing as Causality, that in searching for a cause of 
everything that happens, we are pursuing a mere 
will o' the wisp, using a mere vox nihili which has 



36 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

as little meaning for the reflecting mind as fate or 
fortune ? Surely, in the very act of making the 
distinction between succession and causality, in the 
very act of denyiug that we can discover any causal 
connexion between one physical phenomenon and 
another, we imply that we have got the idea of 
Causality in our minds; and that, however little 
we may have discovered a genuine cause, we could 
not believe that anything could happen without a 
cause. 

For my own part, I find it quite possible to believe 
that a phenomenon which has been followed by 
another phenomenon 9999 times should on the 
10,000th time be followed by some other phenome- 
non. Give me the requisite experience, and belief 
would follow ; give me even any adequate evidence 
that another person has had such an experience 
(though I should be very particular about the 
evidence) , and I should find no difficulty in believing 
it. But to tell me that the exception to an observed 
law might take place without any cause at all for 
the variation would seem to be pure nonsense. 
Put the matter in another way. Let us suppose 
an empty world, if one can speak of such a thing 
without contradiction — let us suppose that at one 
time nothing whatever had existed, neither mind 
nor matter nor any of that mysterious entity which 
some people find it possible to believe in which is 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 37 

neither mind nor matter. Let us suppose literally 
nobody and nothing to have existed. Now could 
you under these conditions rationally suppose that 
anything could have come into existence ? Could 
you for one moment admit the possibility that after 
countless seons of nothingness a flash of lightning 
should occur or an animal be bom ? Surely, on 
reflection those who are most suspicious of a 'priori 
knowledge, who are most unwilling to carry their 
speculations beyond the limits of actual experience, 
will be prepared to say, ' No, the thing is utterly 
for ever impossible.' Ex nihilo nihil fit : for every 
event there must be a cause. Those who profess 
to reject all other a priori or self-evident knowledge, 
show by their every thought and every act that 
they never really doubt that much. 

Now, it would be just possible to contend that we 
have got the bare abstract concept or category of 
Causality in our minds, and yet that there is nothing 
within our experience to give it any positive content 
— so that we should have to say, ' Every event must 
have a cause, but we never know or can know what 
that cause is. If we are to talk about causes at all, 
we can only say " The Unknowable is the cause of 
all things." ' Such a position can be barely stated 
without a contradiction. But surely it is a very 
difficult one. Nature does not generally supply us 
with categories of thought, while it gives us no power 



38 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

or opportunity of using them. It would be like 
holding, for instance, that we have indeed been 
endowed with the idea of number in general, but 
that we cannot discover within our experience any 
numerable things ; that we have got the idea of 
1, 2, 3, 4, etc., but have no capacity whatever for 
actually counting — for saying that here are three 
apples, and there four marbles. And, psychologically, 
it would be difficult to find any parallel to anything 
of the kind. Nature does not first supply us with 
clearly defined categories of thought, and then give 
us a material to exercise them upon. In general 
we discover these abstract categories by using them 
in our actual thinking. We count beads or men or 
horses before we evolve an abstract idea of number, 
or an abstract multiplication table. It is very 
difficult to see how this idea of Cause could possibly 
have got into our heads if we had never in the whole 
course of our experience come into any sort of contact 
with any actual concrete cause. Where then, within 
our experience, if not in the succession of external 
events, shall we look for a cause — for something to 
which we can apply this category or abstract notion 
of causality ? I answer ' We must look within : it 
is in our experience of volition that we actually 
find something answering to our idea of causal 
connexion.' And here, I would invite you not to 
think so much of our consciousness of actually 



n.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 39 

moving our limbs. Here it is possible to argue 
plausibly that the experience of exercising causality 
is a delusion. I imagine that, if I will to do so, I 
can move my arm ; but I will to stretch out my arm, 
and lo ! it remains glued to my side, for I have sud- 
denly been paralysed. Or I may be told that the 
consciousness of exerting power is a mere experience 
of muscular contraction, and the like. I would ask 
you to think rather of your power of directing the 
succession of your own thoughts. I am directly 
conscious, for instance, that the reason why I am 
now thinking of Causality, and not (say) of TarifiE 
Reform, is the fact that I have conceived the design 
of delivering a course of lectures on this subject ; 
the succession of ideas which flow through my mind 
as I write or speak is only explicable by reference 
to an end — an end which I am striving to bring into 
actual being. In such voluntarily concentrated 
purposeful successions of thought I am immediately 
exercising causality : and this causality does further 
influence the order of events in physical nature. 
My pen or my tongue moves in consequence of this 
striving of mine, though no doubt for such efforts 
to take place other physical conditions must be 
presupposed, which are not wholly within my own 
control. I am the cause, but not the whole or sole 
cause of these physical disturbances in external 
nature : I am a cause but not an uncaused cause. 



40 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

My volition, though it is not the sole cause of the 
event which I will, is enough to give me a conception 
of a cause which is the sole cause of the events. 

The attempt is of course sometimes made, as it 
was made by Hume, to explain away this immediate 
consciousness of volition, and to say that all that I 
immediately know is the succession of my subjective 
experiences. It may be contended that I don't know, 
any more than in the case of external phenomena, 
that because the thought of my lecture comes first 
and the thought of putting my pen into the ink to 
write it comes afterwards, therefore the one thought 
causes the other. Hence it is important to point 
out that I have a negative experience with which 
to contrast the positive experience. I do not always, 
even as regards my own inward experiences, assume 
that succession implies Causality. Supposing, as I 
speak or write, a twinge of the gout suddenly intro- 
duces itself into the succession of my experiences : 
then I am conscious of no such inner connexion 
between the new experience and that which went 
before it. Then I am as distinctly conscious of 
passivity — of not causing the succession of events 
which take place in my mind — as I am in the other 
case of actively causing it. If the consciousness of 
exercising activity is a delusion, why does not that 
delusion occur in the one case as much as in the 
other ? I hold then that in the consciousness of 



n.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 41 

/ our own activity we get a real direct experience 
of Causality. When Causality is interpreted to 
mean mere necessary connexion — like the mathe- 
matical connexion between four and twice two or 
the logical connexion between the premisses of a 
Syllogism and its conclusion, — its nature is funda- 
mentally misrepresented. The essence of Causality 
is not necessary connexion but Activity. Such 
activity we encounter in our own experience of 
volition and nowhere else.^ 

Now, if the only cause of which I am immediately 
conscious is the will of a conscious rational being, is 
it not reasonable to infer that some such agency is 
at work in the case of those phenomena which we 
see no reason to attribute to the voluntary actions 
of men and animals ? It is well known that primi- 
tive man took this step. Primitive man had no 
notion of the ' Uniformity of Nature ' : it is only 
very gradually that civilized man has discovered it. 
But primitive man never doubted for one instant 
the law of Causality : he never doubted that for any 
change, or at least for any change of the kind which 
most frequently attracted his attention, there must 

1 The idea of Causality was by Kant identified with the idea of 
logical connexion, i.e. the relation of the premisses of a syllogism 
to its conclusion ; but this does not involre ti7ne »t all, and time 
is essential to the idea of Causality. For an admirable vindication 
of our immediate consciousness of Causality see Professor Stout's 
chapter on ' The Concept of Mental Activity' in Analytic Psychology 
(Book II. chap. i. ). 



42 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

be a cause. Everytliing that moved he supposed 
to be ahve, or to be under the influence of some 
living being more or less like himself. If the sea 
raged, he supposed that the Sea-god was angry. If 
it did not rain to-day, when it rained yesterday, 
that was due to the favour of the Sky-god, and so on. 
The world for him was full of spirits. The argument 
of primitive man's unconscious but thoroughly 
sound Metaphysic is well expressed by the fine 
lines of Wordsworth in the Excursion : 

Once more to distant ages of the world 

Let us, revert, and place before our thoughts 

The face which rural solitude might wear 

To the unenlightened swains of pagan Greece. 

— In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched 

On the soft grass through half a summer's day, 

With music lulled his indolent repose : 

And, in some fit of weariness, if he, 

When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear 

A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds 

Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched, 

Even from the blazing chariot of the sun, 

A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute, 

And filled the illumined groves with ravishment. 

The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye 

Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart 

Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed 

That timely light, to share his joyous sport : 

And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs, 

Across the lawn and through the darksome grove, 

(Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes 

By echo multiplied from rock or cave), 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 43 

Swept in the storm of chace ; as moon and stars 

Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven, 

When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked 

His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked 

The Naiad. Sunbeams, upon distant hills 

Gliding apace, with shadows in their train, 

Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed 

Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly. 

The Zephyrs fanning, as they passed, their wings, 

Lacked not, for love, fair objects whom they wooed 

With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque, 

Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age, 

From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth 

In the low vale, or on steep mountain side ; 

And, sometimes, intermixed with stirring horns 

Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard, — 

These were the lurking Satyrs, a wild brood 

Of gamesome Deities ; or Pan himself. 

The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring God ! ^ 

Growing experience of the unity of Nature, of the 
interdependence of all the various forces and depart- 
ments of Nature, have made such a view of it impos- 
sible to civilized and educated man. Primitive man 
was quite right in arguing that, where he saw motion, 
there must be consciousness like his own. But we 
have been led by Science o believe that whatever 
is the cause of any one phenomenon (at least in 
inanimate nature), must be the cause of all. The 
interconnexion, the regularity, the order observable 
in phenomena are too great to be the result of chance 
or of the undesigned concurrence of a number of 

1 Excursion, Book iv. 



44 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION Clect. 

independent agencies : and perhaps we may go on 
further to argue that this one cause must be the 
ultimate cause even of those events which are 
directly and immediately caused by our own wills. 
But that is a question which I will put aside for the 
present. At least for the events of physical nature 
there must be one Cause. And if the only sort of 
cause we know is a conscious and rational being, 
then we have another most powerful reason for 
believing that the ultimate reality, from which all 
other reality is derived, is Mind — a single conscious 
Mind which we may now further describe as not 
only Thought or Intelligence but also Will.^ 

Let me add this additional consideration in support 
of the conclusion that the world is not merely thought 
by God but is also willed by God. When we talk 
about thought without will, we are talking about 
something that we know absolutely nothing about. 
In all the consciousness that we know of, in every 
moment of our own immediate waking experience, 
we find thought, feeling, willing. Even in the 
consciousness of animals there appears to be some- 
thing analogous to these three sides or aspects of 
consciousness : but at all events in developed human 
consciousness we know of no such thing as thinking 
without willing. All thought involves attention, 
and to attend is to will. If, therefore, on the grounds 

» For the further development of this argument see Lecture IV. 



n.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 45 

suggested by the Hegelian or other post-Kantian 
IdeaHsts, we have been led to think that the ultimate 
Reality is Mind or Spirit, we should naturally con- 
clude by analogy that it must be Will as well as 
Thought and — I may add, though it hardly belongs 
to the present argument to insist upon that — Feeling. 
On the other hand if, with men like Schopenhauer 
and Edouard von Hartmann,i we are conducted by 
the appearances of design in Nature to the idea that 
Nature is striving after something, that the ultimate 
Reality is Will, we must supplement that line of 
argument by inferring from the analogy of our own 
Consciousness that Will without Reason is an un- 
intelligible and meaningless abstraction, and that 
(as indeed even Hartmann saw) Schopenhauer's 
Will without Reason was as impossible an abstraction 
as the apparently will-less universal Thinker of the 
Hegelian : ^ while against Schopenhauer and his 
more reasonable successor, Hartmann, I should insist 
that an unconscious Will is as unintelligible a con- 
tradiction as an unconscious Reason. Schopenhauer 
and Hegel seem to have seen, each of them, exactly 

1 See especially the earlier chapters of The Philosophy of the TJnm 
conscious (translated by W. C. Coupland). 

2 Of course passages can be quoted from Hegel himself which 
suggest the idea that God is Will as well as Thought ; I am speak, 
ing of the general tendency of Hegel and many of his disciples. 
Some recent Hegelians, such as Professor Royce, seem to be less open 
to this criticism, but there are diflBculties in thinking of God as Will 
and yet continuing to speak of ultimate Reality as out of Time. 



46 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

half of the truth : God is not Will without Reason 
or Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will. 
And here I must try to meet an inevitable objec- 
tion. I do not say that these three activities of the 
human intellect stand in God side by side with the 
same distinctness and (if I may say so) irreducibility 
that they do in us. What feeling is for a Being who 
has no material organism, we can form no distinct 
conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes 
of inference from the known to the unknown must 
be very unlike what thought is in a Being to whom 
nothing is unknown. All our thought too involves 
generalization, and in universal concepts (as Mr. 
Bradley has shown us) much that was present in 
the living experience of actual perception is neces- 
sarily left out. Thought is but a sort of repro- 
duction — and a very imperfect reproduction — of 
actual, living, sensible experience. We cannot 
suppose, then, that in God there is the same dis- 
tinction between actual present experience and 
the universal concepts employed in thinking which 
there is in us. And so, again, willing must be a 
very different thing in a being who wills or creates 
the objects of his own thought from what it 
is in beings who can only achieve their ends 
by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner 
between the indeJEinite multiplicity of things which 
they know but do not cause and the tiny fragment 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 47 

of the Universe which by means of this knowledge 
they can control. Nevertheless, though all our 
thoughts of God must be inadequate, it is by thinking 
of Him as Thought, Will and Feeling — emancipated 
from those limitations which are obviously due to 
human conditions and are inapplicable to a Uni- 
versal Mind — that we shall attain to the truest know- 
ledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do you 
fin d a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate 
knowledge ? Just think, then, of our knowledge 
of other people's characters — of what goes on in 
other people's minds. It is only by the analogy of 
our own immediate experience that we can come to 
know anything at all of what goes on in other people's 
minds. And, after all, such insight into other 
people's thoughts, emotions, motives, intentions, 
characters, remains very imperfect. The difficulty 
is greatest when the mind which we seek to penetrate 
is far above our own. How little most of us know 
what it would feel like to be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, 
or a Plato ! And yet it would be absurd to talk as 
if our knowledge of our fellows was no knowledge at 
all. It is sufficient not merely to guide our own 
thoughts and actions, but to make possible sym- 
pathy, friendship, love. Is it not so with our 
knowledge of God ? The Gnosticism which forgets 
the immensity of the difference between the Divine 
Mind and the human is not less unreasonable— 



48 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

not less opposed to the principles on which we 
conduct our thinking in every other department of 
life — than the Agnosticism which rejects proba- 
bilities because we cannot have immediate certain- 
ties, and insists on knowing nothing because we 
cannot know everything. 

The argument which infers that God is Will from 
the analogy of our own consciousness is one which 
is in itself independent of Idealism. It has been 
used by many philosophers who are Realists, such 
as Reid or Dr. Martineau, as well as by Idealists 
like Berkeley, or Pfleiderer, or Lotze. It does not 
necessarily presuppose Idealism ; but it does, to my 
mind, fit in infinitely better with the idealistic mode 
of thought than with the realistic. If you hold that 
there is no difficulty in supposing dead, inert matter 
to exist without any mind to think it or know it, 
but that only a Mind can be supposed to cause 
change or motion, you are assuming a hard and fast 
distinction between matter and force which the whole 
trend of modern Science is tending to break down. 
It seems to imply the old Greek conception of an 
inert, passive, characterless vX-q which can only be 
acted upon from without. The modern Physicist, 
I imagine, knows nothing of an inert matter which 
can neither attract nor repel, even if he does not 
definitely embark on the more speculative theory 
which actually defines the atom or the electron 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 49 

as a centre of force. Activity belongs to the very 
essence of matter as understood by modern Science. 
If matter can exist without mind, there is (from the 
scientific point of view) some difiiculty in contending 
that it cannot likewise move or act without being 
influenced by an extraneous Mind. If, on the other 
hand, with the Idealist we treat the notion of matter 
without mind as an unintelligible abstraction, that line 
of thought would prepare us to see in force nothing 
but a mode of mental action. The Idealist who has 
already identified matter with the object of thought 
will find no difficulty in going on to see in force 
simply the activity or expression or object of Will. 
And if he learns from the Physicist that we cannot 
in the last resort — from the physical point of view — 
distinguish matter from force, that will fit in very 
well with the metaphysical position which regards 
thought and will as simply two inseparable aspects 
of the life of mind. 

And now I will return once more for a moment 
to the idealistic argument. I have no doubt that 
many of you will have felt a difficulty in accepting 
the position that the world with which we come in 
contact is merely a state of our own or anybody else's 
consciousness. It is so obvious that in our experi- 
ence we are in contact with a world which we do not 
create ; which is what it is whether we like it or not ; 
which opposes itself at every turn to our desires and 

D 



50 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

inclinations. You may have been convinced that 
we know nothing of any external world except the 
effects which it produces upon consciousness. But, 
you will say to yourselves, there must have been 
something to cause these effects. You are perfectly 
right in so thinking. Certainly in our experience of 
the world we are in contact with a Reality which is 
not any state of our own mind, a Reality which we 
do not create but simply discover, a Reality from 
which are derived the sensations which we cannot 
help feeling, and the objects which we cannot help 
thinking. So far you are quite right. But very 
often, when the Realist insists that there must be 
something to cause in my mind this appearance, 
which I call my consciousness of a table, he assumes 
all the while that this something — the real table, 
the table in itself — is there, inside or behind the 
phenomenal table that I actually see and feel ; out 
there, in space. But if we were right in our analysis 
of space, if we were right in arguing that space is 
made up of intellectual relations ^ and that intel- 

1 It may be objected that this is true only of 'conceptual space' 
(that is, the space of Geometry), but not of 'perceptual space,' i.e. 
space as it presents itself in a child's perception of an object. The 
distinction is no doubt from many points of view important, but 
we must not speak of ' conceptual space ' and * perceptual space ' 
as if they had nothing to do with one another. If the relations 
of conceptual space were not in some sense contained or implied in 
our perceptions, no amount of abstraction or reflection could get the 
relations out of them. 



II.] THE UNIVEKSAL CAUSE 51 

lectual relations can have no being and no meaning 
except in and for a mind which apprehends them, 
then it is obvious that you must not think of this 
Reahty which is the cause of our experience of 
external objects, as being there, as occupying space, 
as being ' external.' If space be a form of our thought, 
or (in Kantian language) a form of our sensibility, 
then the Reality which is to have an existence in 
itself, cannot be in space. A reality which is not in 
space can no longer be thought of as matter : what- 
ever else matter (as commonly conceived) means, 
it is certainly something which occupies space. 
Now we know of no kind of existence which is not 
in space except Mind. On the idealistic view to 
which I have been endeavouring to lead you, we 
are, indeed, justified in saying that there is a Reality 
which is the underlying cause or ground of our 
experiences, but that that Reality is one which we 
may describe as Thought no less than as Will. 

It may interest some of you to know how near 
one who is often considered the typical representative 
of naturalistic, if not materialistic, modes of thought, 
ultimately came to accepting this identification. 
Let me read to you a passage from one of Mr. 
Spencer's later works — the third volume of his 
Sociology : — 

' This transfiguration, which the inquiries of physicists 
continually increase, is aided by that other transfigura- 



62 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

tion resulting from metaphysical inquiries. Subjective 
analysis compels us to admit that our scientific inter- 
pretations of the phenomena which objects present, are 
expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensa- 
tions and ideas — are expressed, that is, in elements 
belonging to consciousness, which are but symbols of the 
something beyond consciousness. Though analysis 
afterwards reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent 
of showing that behind every group of phenomenal 
manifestations there is always a nexus, which is the 
reality that remains fixed amid appearances which are 
variable ; ^ yet we are shown that this nexus of reality is 
for ever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once 
more, we remember that the activities constituting con- 
sciousness, being rigorously bounded, cannot bring in 
among themselves the activities beyond the bounds, 
which therefore seem unconscious, though produc- 
tion of either by the other seems to imply that they 
are of the same essential nature ; this necessity we are 
under to think of the external energy in terms of the 
internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a 
materialistic aspect to the Universe : further thought, 
however, obliging us to recognize the truth that a con- 
ception given in phenomenal manifestations of this 
ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it is.' ^ 

Now, I think this is one of the passages which 
would justify Mr. Bradley's well-known epigram, that 
Mr. Herbert Spencer has told us more about the 
Unknowable than the rashest of theologians has 
ever ventured to tell us about God. 

1 Sociology, vol. iii. p. 172. 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 53 

Even Kant, who is largely responsible for the 
mistakes about Causality against which this lecture 
has been a protest — I mean the tendency to resolve 
it into necessary connexion — did in the end come 
to admit that in the large resort we come into 
contact with Causality only in our own Wills. I owe 
the reference to Professor Ward, and will quote the 
paragraph in which he introduces it : — 

' Presentation, Feeling, Conation, are ever one insepar- 
able whole, and advance continuously to higher and 
higher forms. But for the fact that psychology was in 
the first instance studied, not for its own sake, but in 
subservience to speculation, this cardinal importance of 
activity would not have been so long overlooked. We 
should not have heard so much of passive sensations and 
so little of active movements. It is especially interesting 
to find that even Kant at length— in his latest work, the 
posthumous treatise on the Connexion of Physics and 
Metaphysics, only recently discovered and published — 
came to see the fundamental character of voluntary 
movement. I will venture to quote one sentence : " We 
should not recognise the moving forces of matter, not 
even through experience, if we were not conscious of our 
own activity in ourselves exerting acts of repulsion, 
approximation, etc." But to Maine de Biran, often called 
the French Kant, to Schopenhauer, and, finally, to our 
own British psychologists. Brown, Hamilton, Bain, 
Spencer, is especially due the merit of seeing the 
paramount importance of the active side of experience. 
To this then primarily, and not to any merely intel- 



54 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

lectual function, we may safely refer tlie category of 
causality.' ^ 

I may add that Professor Ward's Naturalism and 
Agnosticism, from which I have quoted, constitutes 
the most brilliant and important modem defence 
of the doctrine which I have endeavoured very 
inadequately to set before you in this lecture. 

It is a remarkable fact that the typical exponent 
of popular so-called ' scientific ' Agnosticism, and the 
founder of that higher metaphy ical Agnosticism 
which has played so large a part in the history of 
modern Philosophy, should before their deaths have 
both made confessions which really amount to an 
abjuration of all Agnosticism. If the ultimate 
Reality is to be thought of as a rational Will, analogous 
to the will which each of us is conscious of himself 
having or being, he is no longer the Unknown or 
the Unknowable, but the God of Religion, who has 
revealed Himself in the consciousness of man, ' made 
in the image of God.' What more about Himself 
we may also hold to be revealed in the human spirit, 
I hope to consider in our next lecture. But, mean- 
while, a word may be uttered in answer to the 
question which may very probably be asked — Is 
God a Person ? A complete answer to the question 
would involve elaborate discussions, but for our 
present purpose the question may be answered very 

1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. pp. 191-2. 



II.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 55 

briefly. If we are justified in thinking of God after 
the analogy of a human soul — if we are justified 
in thinking of Him as a self-conscious Being who 
thinks, feels, and wills, and who is, moreover (if I 
may a little anticipate the subject of our next 
lecture) in relation with, capable of loving and 
being loved by other such beings — then it seems most 
natural to speak of God's existence as personal. 
For to be a self-conscious being — conscious of itself 
and other beings, thinking, willing, feeling, loving — 
is what we mean by being a person. If any one 
prefers to speak of God as ' super-personal,' there 
is no great objection to so doing, provided that 
phrase is not made (as it often is) an excuse for 
really thinking of God after the analogy of some 
kind of existence lower than that of persons — as a 
force, an unconscious substance, or merely a name 
for the totality of things. But for myself, I prefer 
to say that our own self-consciousness gives us only 
an ideal of the highest type of existence which it 
nevertheless very imperfectly satisfies, and there- 
fore I would rather think God is a Person in a far 
truer, higher, more complete sense than that in which 
any human being can be a person. God alone fully 
realizes the ideal of Personality. The essence of 
Personality is something positive : it signifies to us 
the highest kind of being within our knowledge — 
not (as is too often supposed) the mere limitations 



56 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

and restraints which characterize human conscious 
Hfe as we know it in ourselves. If we are justified 
in thinking of God after the analogy of the highest 
existence within our knowledge, we had better call 
Him a Person. The word is no doubt inadequate to 
the reality, as is all the language that we can employ 
about God ; but it is at least more adequate than 
the terms employed by those who scruple to speak 
of God as a Person. It is at least more adequate 
and more intelligent than to speak of Him as a force, 
a substance, a ' something not ourselves which 
makes for righteousness.' Things do not ' make for 
righteousness ' ; and in using the term Person we 
shall at least make it clear that we do not think of 
Him as a ' thing,' or a collection of things, or a 
vague substratum of things, or even a mere totality 
of minds like our own.^ 



LITERATURE 

As has been explained in this Lecture, many idealistic 
writers who insist upon the necessity of God as a universal, 
knowing Mind to explain both the existence of the world and 
our knowledge of it, are more or less ambiguous about the 
question whether the divine Mind is to be thought of as 
willing or causing the world, though passages occur in the 
writings of most of them which tend in this direction. ' God 

1 For a further discussion of the subject the reader may be referred 
to my essay on * Personality in God and Man ' in Personal 
Jdealism. 



11.] THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE 57 

must be thought of as creating the objects of his own thought ' 
is a perfectly orthodox Hegelian formula. Among the 
idealistic writers (besides Berkeley) who correct this — as it 
seems to me — one-sided tendency, and who accept on the 
whole the view of the divine Causality taken in this Lecture, 
may be mentioned Lotze, the 9th Book of whose Microcosmus 
(translated by Miss Elizabeth Hamilton and Miss Constance 
Jones) or the third Book of his Logic (translation ed. by 
Prof. Bosanquet), may very well be read by themselves 
(his views may also be studied in his short Philosophy 
of Religion — two translations, by the late Mrs. Conybeare 
and by Professor Ladd) ; Pfleiderer, Philosophy and Develop- 
ment of Religion, especially chapter v. ; and Professor Ward's 
Naturalism and Agnosticism. 

Among the non-idealistic writers who have based their 
argument for the existence of God mainly or largely upon the 
consideration that Causality is unintelligible apart from a 
rational Will, may be mentioned — among older writers Reid, 
Essays on the Active Powers of Man, Essay i. (especially 
chapter v.), and among more recent ones Martineau, A Study 
of Religion. Flint's Theism may be recommended as one of 
the best attempts to state the theistic case with a minimum 
of technical Metaphysic. 

Two little books by Professor Andrew Seth (now Seth 
Pringle-Pattison), though not primarily occupied with the 
religious problem, may be mentioned as very useful intro- 
ductions to Philosophy — The Scottish Philosophers and 
Hegelianism and Personality, 



58 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 



LECTURE III 

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 

A COUBSE of purely metaphysical reasoning has led 
us up to the idea of God — that is to say, of a con- 
scious and rational Mind and Will for which the 
world exists and by which that world and all other 
spirits are caused to exist. I have passed over a 
host of difficulties — the relation of God to time, the 
question whether or in what sense the world may 
be supposed to have a beginning and an end, the 
question of the relation in which God, the universal 
Mind, stands to other minds, the question of Free- 
will. These are difficulties which would involve 
elaborate metaphysical discussions : I shall return 
to some of them in a later lecture. It must suffice 
for the present to say that more than one answer 
to many of these questions might conceivably be 
given consistently with the view of the divine nature 
which I have contended for. All that I need insist 
on for my present purpose is — 

(1) That God is personal in the sense that He is a 



in.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 59 

self-conscious, thinking, willing, feeling Being, dis- 
tinguishable from each and all less perfect minds. 

(2) That all other minds are in some sense brought 
into being by the divine Mind, while at the same 
time they have such a resemblance to, or community 
of nature with, their source that they may be regarded 
as not mere creations but as in some sense repro- 
ductions, more or less imperfect, of that source, 
approximating in various degrees to that ideal of 
Personality which is realised perfectly in God alone. 
In proportion as they approximate to that ideal, 
they are causes of their own actions, and can claim 
for themselves the kind of causality which we 
attribute in its perfection to God. I content myself 
now with claiming for the developed, rational 
human self a measure of freedom to the extent 
which I have just defined — that it is the real cause 
of its own actions. It is capable of self-determina- 
tion. The man's actions are determined by his 
character. That is quite consistent with the ad- 
mission that God is the ultimate cause of a self of 
such and such a character coming into existence at 
such and such a time. 

(3) I will not say that the conception of those who 
regard the human mind as literally a part of the 
divine, so that the human consciousness is in no 
sense outside of the divine, is necessarily, for those 
who hold it, inconsistent with the conception of 



60 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

personality both in God and man : I will only say 
that I do not myself understand such an assertion. 
I regard the human mind as derived from God, but 
not as being part of God. Further discussion of 
this question I reserve for my next lecture. 

We have led up to the idea of God's existence. 
But so far we have discovered nothing at all about 
His character or purposes. And it is clear that 
without some such knowledge the belief in God 
could be of little or no value from any religious or 
moral point of view. How are we to learn anything 
about the character of God ? I imagine that at the 
present day few people will attempt to prove the 
goodness or benevolence of God from an empirical 
examination of the facts of Nature or of History. 
There is, no doubt, much in History and in Nature to 
suggest the idea of Benevolence, but there is much 
to suggest a directly opposite conclusion. Few of 
us at the present day are likely to be much impressed 
by the argument which Paley bases upon the exist- 
ence of the little apparatus in the throat by which 
it is benevolently arranged that, though constantly 
on the point of being choked by our food, we hardly 
ever are choked. I cannot help reminding you of 
the characteristic passage : ' Consider a city-feast,' 
he exclaims, ' what manducation, what deglutition, 
and yet not one Alderman choked in a century ! * 
Such arguments look at the matter from the point 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 61 

of view of the Alderman : the point of view of the 
turtle and the turkey is entirely forgotten. I would 
not for a moment speak disrespectfully of the argu- 
ment from design. Darwinism has changed its form, 
but anybody who reads Edouard von Hartmann's 
Philosophy of the Unconscious is not likely to rise 
from its perusal with the idea that the evidences 
of design have been destroyed by Darwinism, what- 
ever he may think of Hartmann's strange conclusion 
that the design can be explained by the operation 
of an unconscious Mind or Will. The philosophical 
argument of Mr. R. B. Haldane in The Pathway 
to Reality,^ and the purely biological argument of 
Dr. John Haldane in his two lectures on Ldfe and 
Mechanism, and still more recently the brilHant 
and very important work of M. Bergson, U Evolution 
Creatrice have, as it seems to me, abundantly shown 
that it is as impossible as ever it was to explain even 
the growth of a plant without supposing that in it 
and all organic Nature there is a striving towards 
an end. But the argument from design, though it 
testifies to purpose in the Universe, tells us nothing 
about the nature of that purpose. Purpose is one 
thing ; benevolent purpose is another. Nobody's 
estimate of the comparative amount of happiness 
and misery in the world is worth much ; but for my 
own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence, 
1 See especially Book ii. Lect. iii. 



62 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

I should not be disposed to do more than shghtly 
attenuate the pessimism of the Pessimists. At all 
events, Nature is far too ' red in tooth and claw ' 
to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent 
deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal 
and human life. There is but one source from 
which such an idea can possibly be derived — from 
the evidence of our own moral consciousness. 

Our moral ideals are the work of Reason. That 
the happiness of many ought to be preferred to the 
happiness of one, that pleasure is better than pain, 
that goodness is of more value than pleasure, that 
some pleasures are better than others — such judge- 
ments are as much the work of our own Reason, 
they are as much self-evident truths, as the truth 
that two and two make four, or that A cannot be 
both B and not B at the same time, or that two 
straight lines cannot enclose a space. We have 
every right to assume that such truths hold good 
for God as well as for man. If such Idealism as I 
have endeavoured to lead you to is well founded, the 
mind which knows comes from God, and therefore the 
knowledge which that mind possesses must also be 
taken as an imperfect or fragmentary reproduction 
of God's knowledge. And the Theist who rejects 
Idealism but admits the existence of self-evident 
truths will be equally justified in assuming that, 
for God as well as for man, two and two must make 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 63 

four. We have just as much right to assume 
that our moral ideas — our ideas of value — must 
come from God too. For God too, as for us, there 
must exist the idea, the ultimate category of the 
good ; and our judgements of value — judgements 
that such and such an end is good or worth striving 
for — in so far as they are true judgements, must be 
supposed to represent His judgements. We are 
conscious, in proportion as we are rational, of 
pursuing ends which we judge to be good. If such 
judgements reveal God's judgements, God must be 
supposed to aim likewise at an ideal of good — the 
same ideal which is revealed to us by our moral 
judgements. In these judgements then we have a 
revelation, the only possible revelation, of the 
character of God. The argument which I have 
suggested is simply a somewhat exacter statement of 
the popular idea that Conscience is the voice of God. 

Further to vindicate the idea of the existence, 
authority, objective validity of Conscience would 
lead us too far away into the region of Moral Philo- 
sophy for our present subject. I will only attempt 
very briefly to guard against some possible mis- 
understandings, and to meet some obvious objections : 

(1) It need hardly be pointed out that the asser- 
tion of the existence of the Moral Consciousness is 
not in the slightest degree inconsistent with recog- 
nising its gradual growth and development. The 



64 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

moral faculty, like every other faculty or aspect or 
activity of the human soul, has grown gradually. 
No rational man doubts the validity — no Idealist 
doubts the a priori character — of our mathematical 
judgements because probably monkeys and possibly 
primitive men cannot count, and certainly cannot 
perform more than the very simplest arithmetical 
operations. Still less do we doubt the validity of 
mathematical reasoning because not only children 
and savages, but sometimes even distinguished 
classical scholars — a Macaulay, a Matthew Arnold, 
a T. S. Evans, — were wholly incapable of under- 
standing very simple mathematical arguments. 
Equally little do we deny a real difference between 
harmony and discord because people may be found 
who see no difference between ' God save the King ' 
and ' Pop goes the Weasel.' Self-evident truth does 
not mean truth which is evident to everybody. 

(2) It is not doubted that the gradual evolution 
of our actual moral ideas — our actual ideas about 
what is right or wrong in particular cases — has 
been largely influenced by education, environment, 
association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps 
natural selection — in short, all the agencies by which 
naturalistic Moralists try to account for the existence 
of Morality. Even Euclid, or whatever his modern 
substitute may be, has to be taught ; but that 
does not show that Geometry is an arbitrary system 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 65 

invented by the ingenious and interested devices 
of those who want to get money by teaching it, 
\ Arithmetic was invented largely as an instrument 
of commerce ; but it could not have been invented 
if there were really no such things as number and 
quantity, or if the human mind had no original 
capacity for recognizing them. Our scientific ideas, 
our political ideas, our ideas upon a thousand 
subjects have been partly developed, partly thwarted 
and distorted in their growth, by similar influences. 
But, however great the difficulty of getting rid of 
these distorting influences and facing such questions 
in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that objec- 
tive truth on such matters is non-existent or for 
ever unattainable. A claim for objective validity 
for the moral judgement does not mean a claim for 
infallibility on behalf of any individual Conscience. 
We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may 
make mistakes in Science, or even in pure Mathe- 
matics. If a class of forty small boys are asked to 
do a sum, they will probably not all bring out the same 
answer : but nobody doubts that one answer alone 
is right, though arithmetical capacity is a variable 
quantity. What is meant is merely that, if I am 
right in affirming that this is good, you cannot be 
likewise right in saying that it is bad : and that 
we have some capacity — though doubtless a 
variable capacity — of judging which is the true 

B 



66 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

view. Hence our moral judgements, in so far as 
they are true judgements, must be taken to be repro- 
ductions in us of the thought of God. To show that 
an idea has been gradually developed, tells us nothing 
as to its truth or falsehood — one way or the other. 

(3) In comparing the self-evidence of moral to 
that of mathematical judgements, it is not suggested 
that our moral judgements in detail are as certain, 
as clear and sharply defined, as mathematical 
judgements, or that they can claim so universal a con- 
sensus among the competent. What is meant is 
merely (a) that the notion of good in general is an 
ultimate category of thought; that it contains a 
meaning iutelligible not perhaps to every individual 
human soul, but to the normal, developed, human 
consciousness ; and (6) that the ultimate truth of 
morals, if it is seen at all, must be seen immediately. 
An ultimate moral truth cannot be deduced from, 
or proved by, any other truth. You cannot prove 
that pleasure is better than pain, or that virtue is 
better than pleasure, to any one who judges differently. 
It does not follow that all men have an equally clear 
and delicate moral consciousness. The power of 
discriminating moral values differs as widely as the 
power of distinguishing musical sounds, or of ap- 
preciating what is excellent in music. Some men 
may be almost or altogether without such a power 
of moral discrimination, just as some men are wholly 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 67 

destitute of an ear for music ; while the higher 
degrees of moral appreciation are the possession of 
the few rather than of the many. Moral insight is 
not possessed by all men in equal measure. Moral 
genius is as rare as any other kind of genius. 

(4) When we attribute Morality to God, it is not 
meant that the conduct which is right for men in 
detail ought to be or could possibly in all cases be 
practised by God. It is a childish objection (though 
it is sometimes made by modern philosophers who 
should know better) to allege with Aristotle that 
God cannot be supposed to make or keep contracts. 
And in the same way, when we claim imiversal 
validity for our moral judgements, we do not mean 
that the rules suitable for human conduct would be 
the same for beings differently organized and con- 
stituted. Our rules of sexual Morality are clearly 
apphcable only to sexually constituted beings. 
What is meant in asserting that these rules are 
universally and objectively valid is that these are 
the rules which every rational intelligence, in pro- 
portion as it is rational, will recognize as being 
suitable, or conducive to the ideal life, in beings 
constituted as we are. The truth that permanent 
monogamous marriage represents the true type of 
sexual relations for human beings will be none the 
less an objectively valid ethical truth, because the 
lower animals are below it, while superior beings, 



68 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

it may be, are above it. Universal love is none the 
less the absolute moral ideal because it would be 
absurd to say that beasts of prey do wrong ia devour- 
ing other creatures, or because war is sometimes 
necessary as a means to the end of love at our present 
imperfect stage of social and intellectual develop- 
ment. The means to the highest good vary with 
circumstances ; the amount of good that is attainable 
in such and such circumstances varies also ; conse- 
quently the right course of conduct will be different 
for beings differently constituted or placed under 
different circumstances : but the principles which, 
in the view of a perfect intelligence, would determine 
what is the right course for different beings in 
different circumstances will be always the same. 
The ultimate principles of our moral judgement, 
e.g. that love is better than hate, are Just as ap- 
plicable to God as they are to us. Our conception 
of the highest good may be inadequate ; but we 
certainly shall not attain to greater adequacy, or a 
nearer approach to ultimate truth, by flatly con- 
tradicting our own moral judgements. It would be 
just as reasonable to argue that because the law of 
gravitation might be proved, from the point of view 
of the highest knowledge, to be an inadequate state- 
ment of the truth, and all inadequacy involves some 
error, therefore we had better assume that from the 
point of view of God there is no difference whatever 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 69 

between attraction and repulsion. All arguments 
for what is called a ' super-moral ' Deity or a ' super- 
moral ' Absolute are open to this fatal objection : 
moral judgements cannot possibly rest upon anything 
but the moral consciousness, and yet these doctrines 
contradict the moral consciousness. The idea of 
good is derived from the moral consciousness. Wlien 
a man declares that from the point of view of the 
Universe all things are very good, he gets the idea 
of good from his own moral consciousness, and is 
assuming the objective validity of its dictates. 
His judgement is an ethical judgement as much as 
mine when I say that to me some things in this 
world appear very bad. If he is not entitled to 
assume the validity of his ethical judgements, his 
proposition is false or meaningless. If he is entitled 
to assume their validity, why should he distrust 
that same moral consciousness when it affirms (as 
it undoubtedly does) that pain and sin are for ever 
bad, and not (as our 'super-moral' Religionists 
suggest) additional artistic touches which only add 
to the aesthetic effect of the whole ? 

I shall now proceed to develope some of the conse- 
quences which (as it appears to me) flow from the 
doctrine that our belief in the goodness of God is an 
inference from our owti moral consciousness : 

(1) It throws light on the relations between 
Religion and Morality. The champions of ethical 



70 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

education as a substitute for Religion and of ethical 
societies as a substitute for Churches are fond of 
assuming that Religion is not only unnecessary to, 
but actually destructive of, the intrinsic authority 
of the moral law. If we supposed with a few theo- 
logians in the most degenerate periods of Theology 
(with William of Occam, some extreme Calvinists, 
and a few eighteenth - century divines like Arch- 
deacon Paley) that actions are right or wrong merely 
because willed by God — meaning by God simply a 
powerful being without goodness or moral character, 
then undoubtedly the Secularists would be right. 
If a religious Morality implies that Virtue means 
merely (in Paley' s words) ' the doing good to man- 
kind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake 
of everlastiag happiness ' (so that if God were to will 
murder and adultery, those practices would forth- 
with become meritorious), then undoubtedly it 
would be better to teach Morality without Religion 
than with it. But that is a caricature of the true 
teaching of Christ or of any considerable Christian 
theologian. Undoubtedly we must assert what is 
called the ' independence ' of the moral judgement. 
The judgement ' to love is better than to hate ' has 
a meaning complete in itself, which contains no refer- 
ence whatever to any theological presupposition. 
It is a judgement which is, and which can intelligibly 
be, made by people of all religions or of none. But 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 71 

we may still raise the question whether the validity 
of that judgement can be defended without theological 
implications. And I am prepared most distinctly 
to maintain that it cannot. These moral judgements 
claim objective validity. When we say ' this is 
right,' we do not mean merely ' I approve this course 
of conduct,' ' this conduct gives me a thrill of satis- 
faction, a " feeling of approbation," a pleasure of 
the moral sense.' If that were all that was meant, 
it would be perfectly possible that another person 
might feel an equally satisfactory glow of approba- 
tion at conduct of a precisely opposite character 
without either of them being wrong. A bull-fight 
fills most Spaniards with feelings of lively approba- 
tion, and most Englishmen with feelings of acute 
disapprobation. If such moral judgements were mere 
feelings, neither of them would be wrong. There 
could be no question of objective rightness or wrong- 
ness. Mustard is not objectively nice or objectively 
nasty : it is simply nice to some people and nasty 
to others. The mustard-lover has no right to con- 
demn the mustard-hater, or the mustard-hater the 
mustard-lover. If Morality were merely a matter 
of feeling or emotion, actions would not be objectively 
right or objectively wrong ; but simply right to 
some people, wrong to others. Hume would be 
right in holding the morality of an action to consist 
simply in the pleasure it gives to the person who 



72 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

contemplates it. Rightness thus becomes simply a 
name for the fact of social approbation. ^ And yet 
surely the very heart of the affirmation which the 
moral consciousness makes in each of us is that right 
and wrong are not matters of mere subjective feeling. 
When I assert ' this is right,' I do not claim personal 
infallibility. I may, indeed, be wrong, as I may be 
wrong in my political or scientific theories. But I 
do mean that I think I am right ; and that, if I am 
right, you cannot also be right when you affirm that 
this same action is wrong. This objective validity 
is the very core and centre of the idea of Duty or 
moral obligation. That is why it is so important 
to assert that moral judgements are the work of 
Reason, not of a supposed moral sense or any other 
kind of feeling. Feelings may vary in different men 
without any of them being in the wrong ; red really 
is the same as green to a colour-blind person. What 
we mean when we talk about the existence of Duty 
is that things are right or wrong, no matter what 
you or I think about them — that the laws of Morality 



1 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases : 
but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in 
effect feel that it is virtuous.' [Treatise, Part I. § ii., ed. Green and 
Grose, vol. ii. p. 247. ) ' The distinction of moral good and evil is 
founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any 
sentiment, or character ; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be 
unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much 
virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible 
in this particular we can ever be mistaken.' {Ibid. vol. ii. p. 311.) 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 73 

are quite as much independent of my personal likings 
and dislikings as the physical laws of Nature. That 
is what is meant by the ' objectivity ' of the moral 
law. 

Now, the question arises — ' Can such an objec- 
tivity be asserted by those who take a purely material- 
istic or naturalistic view of the Universe ? ' What- 
ever our metaphysical theories about the nature of 
Reality may be, we can in practice have no difficulty 
in the region of Physical Science about recognizing 
an objective reality of some kind which is other 
than my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn 
whether I think so or not is practically recognized 
by persons of all metaphysical persuasions. If I 
say ' I can cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare 
imagination of a feast,' I try the experiment, and I 
fail. I imagine the feast, but I am hungry still : 
and if I persist in the experiment, I die. But what do 
we mean when we say that things are right or wrong 
whether I think them so or not, that the Moral Law 
exists outside me and independently of my thinking 
about it ? Where and how does this moral law exist ? 
The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by 
the Materialist or the Realist somehow to exist 
in matter : to the Metaphysician there may be diffi- 
culties in such a view, but the difficulties are not 
obvious to common-sense. But surely (whatever 
may be thought about physical laws) the moral law, 



74 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

which expresses not any matter of physical fact but 
what ought to be thought of acts, cannot be supposed 
to exist in a purely material Universe. An ' ought ' 
can exist only in and for a mind. In what mind, 
then, does the moral law exist ? As a matter of 
fact, different people's moral judgements contradict 
one another. And the consciousness of no living 
man can well be supposed to be a flawless reflection 
of the absolute moral ideal. On a non-theistic 
view of the Universe, then, the moral law cannot 
well be thought of as having any actual existence. 
The objective validity of the moral law can indeed 
be and no doubt is asserted, believed in, acted upon 
without reference to any theological creed ; but it 
cannot be defended or fully justified without l-ne pre- 
supposition of Theism. What we mean by an objec- 
tive law is that the moral law is a part of the ultimate 
nature of things, on a level with the laws of physical 
nature, and it cannot be that, unless we assume that 
law to be an expression of the same mind in which 
physical laws originate. The idea of duty, when 
analysed, implies the idea of God. Whatever else 
Plato meant by the ' idea of the good,' this at least 
was one of his meanings — that the moral law has its 
source in the source of all Reality. 
, And therefore at bottom popular feeling is right 
in holding that religious belief is necessary to Moral- 
ity. Of course I do not mean to say that, were 



HI.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 75 

religious belief to disappear from the world, Morality 
would disappear too. But I do think Morality would 
become quite a different thing from what it has been 
for the higher levels of religious thought and feeling. 
The best men would no doubt go on acting up to 
their own highest ideal just as if it did possess 
objective validity, no matter how unable they might 
be to reconcile their practical with their speculative 
beliefs. But it would not be so for the many — or 
perhaps even for the few in their moments of weak- 
ness and temptation, when once the consequences 
of purely naturalistic Ethics were thoroughly ad- 
mitted and realized. The only kind of objective 
validity which can be recognized on a purely natural- 
istic view of Ethics is conformity to public opinion. 
The tendency of all naturalistic Ethics is to make a 
God of public opinion. And if no other deity were 
recognized, such a God would assuredly not be with- 
out worshippers. And yet the strongest temptation 
to most of us is the temptation to follow a debased 
pubUc opinion — the opinion of our age, our class, 
our party. Apart from faith in a perfectly righteous 
God whose commands are, however imperfectly, 
revealed in the individual Conscience, we can find 
no really valid reason why the individual should act 
on his own sense of what is intrinsically right, even 
when he finds himself an 'Athanasius contra mundum,' 
and when his own personal likings and inclinations 



76 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

and interests are on the side of the world. Kant 
was at bottom right, though perhaps he did not 
give the strongest reasons for his position, in making 
the idea of God a postulate of Morality. 

From a more directly practical point of view I 
need hardly point out how much easier it is to feel 
towards the moral law the reverence that we ought 
to feel when we believe that that law is embodied 
in a personal Will. Not only is religious Morality 
not opposed to the idea of duty for duty's sake : 
it is speculatively the only reasonable basis of it ; 
practically and emotionally the great safeguard of 
it. And whatever may be thought of the possibility 
of a speculative defence of such an idea without 
Theism, the practical difficulty of teaching it — 
especially to children, uneducated and unreflective 
persons — seems to be quite insuperable. ^ In more 
than one country in which religious education has 
been banished from the primary schools, grave 
observers complain that the idea of Duty seems to 
be suffering an eclipse in the minds of the rising genera- 

1 There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the 
Universe without what most of us understand by Theism, though 
not without Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical 
character ; but because such non-theistic modes of religious thought 
exist in Buddhism, for instance, it does not follow that they are 
reasonable, and, at all events, they are hardly intelligible to most 
Western minds. Such non-theistic Religions imply a Meta- 
physic quite as much as Christianity or Buddhism. There have been 
Religions without the idea of a personal God, but never without 
Metaphysic, i.e. a theory about the ultimate nature of things. 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL^CONSCIOUSNESS 77 

tion ; some of them add that in those lands crime 
is steadily on the increase. Catechisms of civU duty 
and the like have not hitherto proved very satisfactory 
substitutes for the old teaching about the fear of 
God. Would that it were more frequently remem- 
bered on both sides of our educational squabbles 
that the supreme object of all religious education 
should be to instil into children's mmds in the 
closest possible connexion the twin ideas of God 
and of Duty ! 

(2) I have tried to show that the ethical import- 
ance of the idea of God is prior to and independent 
of any belief m the idea of future rewards and 
punishments or of a future life, however conceived 
of. But when the idea of a righteous God has once 
been accepted, the idea of Immortality seems to 
me to follow from it as a sort of corollary. If any 
one on a calm review of the actual facts of the world's 
history can suppose that such a world as ours could 
be the expression of the will of a rational and moral 
Being without the assumption of a future life for 
which this is a discipline or education or preparatory 
stage, argument would be useless with him. In- 
veterate Optimism, like inveterate Scepticism, admits 
of no refutation, but in most minds produces no 
conviction. For those who are convinced that the 
world has a rational end, and yet that life as we see 
it (taken by itself) cannot be that end, the hypothesis 



78 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

of Immortality becomes a necessary deduction from 
their belief in God. 

I would not disparage the educative effect of the 
belief in a future life even when expressed in the 
crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and 
punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have 
reached the moral level at which the belief — not in 
a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but 
in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls 
prolonged after death — is without its value. At 
the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher 
religious beliefs when the religious motive is sup- 
posed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope 
of personal reward, even of the least sensuous or 
material kind. Love of goodness for its own sake 
is for the Theist identical with the love of God. 
Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion 
to an idea ; and an ethical conception of God carries 
with it the idea of Immortality. 

The wages of sin is death : if the wages of Virtue be dust, 
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm 
and the fly ? 
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, 
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky : 
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.^ 

Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, 
the postulate without which most of us cannot 
1 Tennyson's Wages, 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 79 

believe in God. Even for its own sake it is of the 
highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality gives 
a meaning to life even when it has lost all other 
meaning. ' It is rather,' in the noble words of the 
late Professor Sidgwick, ' from a disinterested aver- 
sion to an universe so irrationally constituted that 
the wages of virtue should be dust than from any 
private reckoning about his own wages,' that the 
good man clings to the idea of Immortality. And 
that is not all. The value of all higher goods even 
in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon 
their duration, does partly depend upon it. It 
would be better to be pure and unselfish for a day 
than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet 
we do not hesitate to commend the value of intel- 
lectual and of all kinds of higher enjoyments on 
account of their greater durability. Why, then, 
should we shrink from admitting that the value of 
character really is increased when it is regarded as 
surviving bodily death ? Disbelief in Immortality 
would, I believe, in the long run and for the vast 
majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhance- 
ment of the value of the carnal and sensual over the 
spiritual and intellectual element in life. 

(3) A third consequence which follows from our 
determining to accept the moral consciousness as 
containing the supreme revelation of God is this. 
From the point of view of the moral consciousness 



80 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

we cannot say that the Universe is wholly good. 
We have only one means of judging whether things 
are good or bad : the idea of value is wholly derived 
from our own ethical judgements or judgements of 
value. If we distrust these judgements, there is no 
higher court to which we can appeal. And if we 
distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I 
do not know why we should trust any judgements 
whatever. Even if we grant that from some very 
transcendental metaphysical height — the height, for 
instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy — it may be 
contended that none of our judgements are wholly 
true or fully adequate to express the true nature of 
Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality 
than we are conducted by the judgements which 
present themselves to us as immediate and self- 
evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of 
value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that 
everything in it seems to be very good ? For my 
own part, I unhesitatingly say, ' Pain is an evil, 
and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can 
ever make them good.' How then are we to account 
for such evils in a Universe which we believe to ex- 
press the thought and will of a perfectly righteous 
Being ? In only one way that I know of — by 
supposing they are means to a greater good. That 
is really the substance and substratum of all the 
Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the Theo- 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 81 

logians except those who frankly trample on or 
throw over the Moral Consciousness, and declare 
that, for those who see truly, pain and sin are only 
additional sources of aesthetic interest in a great 
world-drama produced for his own entertainment by 
a Deity not anthropomorphic enough to love but still 
anthropomorphic enough to be amused. 

I shall be told no doubt that this is limiting God. 
A human being may, it will be urged, without loss 
of goodness, do things in themselves evil, as a means 
to a greater good : as a surgeon, he may cause 
excruciating pain ; as a statesman or a soldier, he 
may doom thousands to a cruel death ; as a wise 
administrator of the poor law, he may refuse to 
reheve much suffering, in order that he may not 
cause more suffering. But this is because his power 
is limited ; he has to work upon a world which has 
a nature of its own independent of his volition. To 
apply the same explanation to the evil which God 
causes, is to make Him finite instead of Infinite, 
limited in power instead of Omnipotent. Now in 
a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded 
to the words ' Infinite ' or ' Omnipotent.' But I 
would protest against a persistent misrepresentation 
of the point of view which I defend. It is suggested 
that the limit to the power of God must necessarily 
spring from the existence of some other thing or being 
outside of Him, not created by Him or under His 

F 



82 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

control. I must protest that that is not so. Every- 
body admits that God cannot change the past ; few 
Philosophers consider it necessary to maintain that 
God could construct triangles with their angles not 
together equal to two right angles, or think it any 
derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He 
could not make the sum of two and two to be other 
than four. Few Theologians push their idea of 
Freewill so far as to insist that God could will 
Himself to be unjust or unloving, or that, being 
just and loving, he could do unjust or unloving 
acts. There are necessities to which even God 
must submit. But they are not imposed upon Him 
from without : they are parts of His own essential 
nature. The limitation by which God cannot attain 
His ends without causing some evil is a limitation 
of exactly the same nature. If you say that it is 
no limitation of God not to be able to change the 
past, for the thing is really unmeaning, then I submit 
that in the same way it may be no limitation that He 
should not be able to evolve highly organized beings 
without a struggle for existence, or to train human 
beings in unselfishness without allowing the existence 
both of sin and of pain. From the point of view of 
perfect knowledge, these things might turn out to 
be just as unmeaning as for God to change the past. 
The popular idea of Omnipotence is one which really 
does not bear looking into. If we supposed the world 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 83 

to contain no evil at all, still there would be in it a 
definite amount of good. Twice such a world would 
be twice as good. Why is there not twice that 
amount of good ? A being who deliberately created 
only a good world of limited quantity — a definite 
number of spirits (for instance) enjoying so much 
pleasure and so much virtue — when he could have 
created twice that number of spirits, and conse- 
quently twice that amount of good, would not be 
perfectly good or loving. And so on ad infinitum, 
no matter how much good you suppose him to have 
created. The only sense which we can intelligibly 
give to the idea of a divine Omnipotence is this — 
that God possesses all the power there is, that He can 
do all things that are in their own nature possible.^ 

But there is a more formidable objection which I 
have yet to meet. It has been urged by certain 
Philosophers of great eminence that, if we suppose 
God not to be unlimited in power, we have no 
guarantee that the world is even good on the whole ; 
we should not be authorized to infer anything as 
to a future life or the ultimate destiny of Humanity 
from the fact of God's goodness. A limited God 
might be a defeated God. I admit the difficulty. 
This is the 'greatest wave' of all in the theistic 

1 The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is ' Cum possit Deus omnia 
efficere quae esse possunt, non autem quae contradictionem implicant, 
omnipotons merito dicitur.' {Summa TheoL, Pars i. Q. xxt. art. 3.) 



84 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

argument. In reply, I would simply appeal to the 
reasons which I have given for supposing that the 
world is really willed by God. A rational being 
does not will evil except as a means to a greater 
good. If God be rational, we have a right to suppose 
that the world must contain more good than evil, 
or it would not be willed at all. A being who was 
obliged to create a world which did not seem to him 
good would be a blind force, as force is understood 
by the pure Materialist, not a rational Will. That 
much we have a right to claim as a matter of strict 
Logic ; and that would to my own mind be a sufficient 
reason for assuming that, at least for the higher 
order of spirits, such a life as ours must be intended 
as the preface to a better life than this. But I 
should go further. To me it appears that such 
evils as sin and pain are so enormously worse than 
the mere absence of good, that I could not regard 
as rational a Universe in which the good did not very 
greatly predominate over the evil. More than that 
I do not think we are entitled to say. And yet 
Justice is so great a good that it is rational to hope 
that for every individual conscious being — at least 
each individual capable of any high degree of good 
— there must be a predominance of good on the 
whole. Beings of very small capacity might con- 
ceivably be created chiefly or entirely as a means 
to a vastly greater good than any that they them- 



III.] GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS 85 

selves enjoy : the higher a spirit is in the scale of 
being, the more difficult it becomes to suppose 
that it has been brought into existence merely as 
a means to another's good, or that it will not ulti- 
mately enjoy a good which will make it on the whole 
good that it should have been bom. 

I could wish myself that, in popular religious 
teaching, there was a franker conception of this 
position — a position which, as I have said, is 
really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. 
Popular unbelief — and sometimes the unbelief of 
more cultivated persons — rests mainly upon the 
existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it 
by teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible 
Universes, though not the best of all imaginable 
Universes — such Universes as we can construct in 
our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all 
the good that there is in the world without any of 
the evil. We may still say, if we please, that God 
is infinite because He is limited by nothing outside 
His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. 
We can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that 
He possesses all the power there is. And in many 
ways such a belief is far more practically consolatory 
and stimulating than a belief in a God who can 
do all things by any means and who consequently 
does not need our help. In our view, we are engaged 
not in a sham warfare with an evil that is really 



86 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lbct. 

good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a 
struggle in which we have the ultimate power in the 
Universe on our side, but one in which the victory 
cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in 
which we are called upon to be literally fellow- 
workers with God. 



LITEEATUEE 

The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with ia most 
of the TTorks mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and 
also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. 
Classical vindications of the authority of the Moral Conscious- 
ness are Bishop Butler's Sermons, and Kant's Fundamental 
Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals and other ethical 
writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my 
own views on the subject with some fullness in the third 
book of my Theory of Good and Evil. 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 87 



LECTURE IV 

DIFnCULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 

In the present lecture I shall try to deal with some 
of the difficulties which will probably have been 
arising in your minds in the course of the last three ; 
and in meeting them, to clear up to some extent 
various points which have been left obscure. 

(1) Creation. I have endeavoured to show that 
the world must be thought of as ultimately an 
experience in the mind of God, parts of which are 
progressively communicated to lesser minds such as 
ours. This experience — both the complete experi- 
ence which is in His own mind and also the measure 
of it which is communicated to the lesser minds — 
must be thought of as willed by God. At the same 
time I suggested as an alternative view that, even 
if we think of things as having an existence which 
is not simply in and for minds, the things must be 
caused to exist by a rational Will. Now the world, 
as we know it, consists of a number of changes taking 
place in time, changes which are undoubtedly repre- 
sented in thought as changes happening to, or acci- 



88 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lbct. 

dents of, a permanent substance, whether (with the 
Idealist) we suppose that this substance is merely 
the object of Mind's contemplation, or whether (with 
the Realist) we think of it as having some sort of 
being independent of Mind. But what of the first 
of these events — the beginning of the whole series ? 
Are we to think of the series of events in time as 
having a beginning and possibly an end, or as being 
without beginning or end ? What in fact are we 
to make of the theological idea of Creation, often 
further defined as Creation out of nothing ? It is 
often suggested both by Idealists and by Realists 
that the idea of a creation or absolute beginning of 
the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me 
to be a piece of unwarrantable a 'priori dogmatism — 
quite as much so as the closely connected idea that 
the Uniformity of Nature is an a priori necessity 
of thought. No doubt the notion of an absolute 
beginning of all things is unthinkable enough : if 
we think of God as creating the world at a definite 
point of time, then we must suppose God Himself 
to have existed before that creation. We cannot 
think of an event in time without thinking of a time 
before it ; and time cannot be thought of as merely 
empty time. Events of some kind there must neces- 
sarily have been, even though those events are 
thought of as merely subjective experiences involving 
no relation to space. A beginning of existence is, 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 89 

indeed, unthinkable. But there is no difficulty in 
supposing that this particular series of phenomena 
which constitutes our physical Universe may have 
had a beginning in time. On the other hand there 
is no positive evidence, for those who cannot regard 
the early chapters of Genesis as representing on such 
a matter anything but a primitive legend edited by 
a later Jewish thinker, that it had such a beginning. 
It is no doubt more difficult to represent to ourselves 
a beginning of space ; and the notion of an empty 
space, eternally thought but not eternally filled up 
by any series of phenomena of the space-occupying 
kind, represents a rather difficult, though not (as it 
seems to me) an absolutely impossible conception. 
The question, therefore, whether there was a begin- 
ning of the series of events which constitute the 
history of our physical world must (so far as I can 
see) be left an open one. 

Of course if the argument of Lord Kelvin be 
accepted, if he is justified in arguing on purely 
physical groimds that the present distribution of 
energy in the Universe is such that it cannot have 
resulted from an infinite series of previous physical 
changes, if Science can prove that the series is a 
finite one, the conclusions of Science must be ac- 
cepted.^ Metaphysic has nothing to say for or against 
such a view. That is a question of Physics on which 
» Cf. Flint's Theism, Ed. v., p. 117 and App. xj. 



90 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

of course I do not venture to express any opinion 
whatever. 

(2) The time-series. I am incompetent to pro- 
nounce an opinion on the validity of such arguments 
as Lord Kelvin's. But, however we decide this 
question, there will still remain the further and 
harder question, * Is the series of all events or 
experiences, physical or psychical (not merely the 
particular series which constitutes our physical 
Universe), to be thought of as finite or infinite ? 
On the one hand it involves a contradiction to talk 
of a time-series which has a beginning : a time 
which has no time before it is not time at all ; any 
more than space with an end to it would be space. 
On the other hand, we find equally, or almost equally, 
unthinkable the hypothesis of an endless series of 
events in time : a series of events, which no possible 
enumeration of its members will make any smaller, 
presents itself to us as imthinkable, directly we 
regard it as expressing the true nature of a positive 
reality, and not as a mere result of mathematical 
abstraction. Here then we are presented with an 
antinomy — an apparent contradiction in our thought 
— which we can neither avoid nor overcome. It is 
one of the classical antinomies recognized by the 
Kantian Philosophy — the only one, I may add, 
which neither Kant himself nor any of his successors 
has done anything to attenuate or to remove. 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 91 

Kant's own attempted solution of it involved the 
impossible supposition that the past has no exist- 
ence at all except in so far as it is thought by some 
finite mind in the present. The way out of this diffi- 
culty which is popular with post-Kantian Idealists 
is to say that God is Himself out of time, and eternally 
sees the whole series at once. But, in the first place, 
that does not get over the difficulty : even if God 
does see the whole series at once, He must see it 
either as Hmited or as endless, and the old antinomy 
breaks out again when we attempt to think either 
alternative. And secondly, when you treat a 
temporal series as one which is all really present 
together— of course it may all be known together 
as even we know the past and the future— but when 
you try to think of God as contemplating the whole 
series as really present altogether, the series is no 
longer a time-series. You have turned it into some 
other kind of series— practically (we may say) into 
a spacial series. You have cut the knot, instead of 
unravelhng it. I have no doubt that the existence 
of this antinomy does point to the fact that there 
is some way of thinking about tune from which the 
difficulty disappears : but we are, so far as I can 
see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers 
resent the idea of an insoluble problem. By all 
means let them go on trying to solve it. I can only 
say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility 



92 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

of any solution of the time-difficulty which I have 
so far seen. For the present at least — I strongly 
suspect for ever — we must acquiesce on this matter 
in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the 
absurdity of regarding time as merely subjective ; 
we can show that it belongs to the very essence of 
the Universe we know ; we can show that it is as 
' objective ' as anything else within our knowledge. 
But how to reconcile this objectivity with the 
difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no 
Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious 
purposes it seems enough to believe that each 
member of the time- series — ^no matter how many 
such events there may be, no matter whether the 
series be endless or not — is caused by God. The 
more reflecting Theologians have generally admitted 
that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the 
same as that of Creation. A God who can be repre- 
sented as ' upholding all things by the power of his 
word ' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation 
be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were 
any meaning in that phrase) out of time altogether.^ 

1 The most illuminating discussion of time and the most convincing 
argument for its ' objectivity ' which I knovir, is to be found in Lotze's 
Metaphysic, Book ii. chap, iii., but it cannot be recommended to 
the beginner in Metaphysic. A brilliant exposition of the view of 
the Universe which regards time and change as belonging to the 
very reality of the Universe, has recently appeared in M. Bergson's 
L'Evolution Creatrice, but he has hardly attempted to deal with 
the metaphysical difficulties indicated above. The book, however. 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 93 

(3) The creation of spirits. It may seem to some 
of you that I may have so far left out, or too easily 
disposed of, an important link in our argument. I 
have given reasons for thinking that the material 
world cannot be explained without the assumption 
of a universal Consciousness which both thinks and 
wills it. I have assumed rather than proved that 
the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is 
partially reproduced, are also caused to exist and 
kept in existence by the same divine Will. But 
how, it may be said, do we know that those minds 
did not exist before the birth of the organisms with 
which upon this planet they are connected ? The 
considerations which forbid our thinking of matter 
as something capable of existing by itself do not 
apply to minds. A consciousness, unlike a thing, 
exists ' for itself,' not merely ' for another ' : a mind 
is not made what it is by being known or otherwise 
experienced by another mind : its very being consists 
in being itself conscious : it is what it is for itself. 
It is undoubtedly impossible positively to disprove 
the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls. Some- 
times that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It 



seems to me the most important philosophical work that has ap- 
peared since Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, and though the. 
writer has hardly formulated his Natural Theology, it constitutes a 
very important contribution to the theistic argument. Being based 
upon a profound study of biological Evolution, it may be specially 
commended to scientific readers. 



94 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lbct. 

is supposed tliat God is the supreme and incom- 
parably the most powerful, but not the only, self- 
existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis — some- 
times spoken of as Pluralism ^ — has many attrac- 
tions : from the time of Origen onwards the idea of 
Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the 
explanation of evil by making it possible to regard 
the sufferings of our present state as a disciplinary 
process for getting rid of an original or a pre-natal 
sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying 
the demands of the religious Consciousness, and may 
even form an element in an essentially Christian 
theory of the Universe : but to my mind it is opposed 
to all the obvious indications of experience. The 
connexion between soul and body is such that the 
laws of the soul's development obviously form part 
of the same system with the laws of physical nature. 
If one part of that system is referred to the divine 
Will, so must the whole of it be. The souls, when 
they have entered animal bodies, must be supposed 
to be subject to a system of laws which is of one piece 
with the system of physical laws. If the physical 
part of the world-order is referred to the divine Will, 
the psychical part of it must be equally referred to 

1 Such a view is expounded in Dr. Schiller's early work The Riddles 
of the Sphinx and in Professor Howison's The Limits of Evolution. 
The very distinguished French thinker Charles Eenouvier [LaNouvdle 
Monadologie, etc. ), like Origen, believed that souls were pre-existent 
but created. 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 95 

that Will. The souls might, indeed, conceivably 
have an independent and original nature of their 
own capable of offering resistance to the divine 
intentions. But we see, to say the least, no indica- 
tions of a struggle going on between an outside 
divine Will and independent beings not forming a 
part of the divine scheme. At all events, the result 
of this struggle, if struggle there be, is (so far as 
we can observe) a system, complete and orderly, 
within the psychical sphere as much as within the 
purely physical sphere. And in particular the body 
is exactly fitted to the soul that is to inhabit it. 
We never find the intellect of a Shakespeare in 
connexion with the facial angle of a negro ; bodies 
which resemble the bodies of their parents are con- 
nected with souls between which a similar resem- 
blance can be traced. If the souls existed before 
birth, we must suppose those souls to be kept waiting 
in a limbo of some kind till a body is prepared 
suitable for theii reception. We must suppose 
that among the waiting souls, one is from time to 
time selected to be the offspring of such and such 
a matrimonial union, so as to present (as it were) 
a colourable appearance of being really the fruit of 
that union. Further, before bhth the souls must 
be steeped in the waters of Lethe, or something of 
the kind, so as to rid them of all memory of their 
previous experiences. Such a conception seems to 



96 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

me to belong to the region of Mythology rather 
than of sober philosophical thought. I do not 
deny that Mythology may sometimes be a means 
of pictorially or symbolically envisaging truths to 
which Philosophy vaguely points but which it 
cannot express in clearly apprehensible detail. 
But such a Mythology as this seems to be intellectu- 
ally unmotived and unhelpful. It is not wanted to 
explain the facts : there is nothing in our experience 
to suggest it, and much which is 'prima facie opposed 
to it. It really removes no single difficulty : for 
one difficulty which it presents some appearance of 
removing, it creates a dozen greater ones. It is a 
hypothesis which we shall do well to dismiss as 
otiose. 

(4) Non-theistic Idealism. Somewhat less un- 
motived, if we look upon it from a merely intellectual 
point of view, is the theory of pre-existent souls 
without a personal God. Many, if not most, of you 
probably possess more or less acquaintance with the 
views of my friend. Dr. McTaggart. I cannot here 
undertake a full exposition or criticism of one of the 
ablest thinkers of our day — one of the very few 
English thinkers who is the author of a truly original 
metaphysical system. I can only touch — and that 
most inadequately — upon the particular side of it 
which directly bears upon our present enquiry. Dr. 
McTaggart is an Idealist ; he recognizes the impos- 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 97 

sibility of matter without mind. For him nothing 
exists but spirits, but he does not recognize the 
necessity for any one all-embracing or controlHng 
Spirit : the only spirits in his Universe are limited 
minds like those of men and animals. He dififers, 
then, from the Pluralist of the type just mentioned 
in getting rid of the hypothesis of a personal God 
side by side with and yet controlling the uncreated 
spirits. And he differs further from all Pluralists 
in not treating the separate spirits as so many 
centres of consciousness quite independent of, and 
possibly at war with, all the rest : the spirits form 
part of an ordered system : the world is a unity, 
though that unity is not the unity which belongs 
to self-consciousness. He recognizes, in the tradi- 
tional language of Philosophy, an Absolute, but this 
Absolute is not a single spiritual Being but a Society : 
or, if it is to be called a single spiritual Being, it is 
a Being which exists or manifests itself only in a 
plurality of limited consciousnesses. 

This scheme is, I admit, more reasonable than 
Pluralism. It does, nominally at least, recognize 
the world as an ordered system. It gets rid of the 
difficulty of accounting for the apparent order of 
the Cosmos as the result of a struggle between 
independent wills. It is not, upon its author's pre- 
suppositions, a gratuitous theory : for a mind which 
accepts Idealism and rejects Theism it is the only 

G 



98 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

intelligible alternative. But I must confess that it 
seems to me open to most of the difficulties which I 
have endeavoured to point out in Pluralism, and to 
some others. In the first place, there is one, to my 
mind, great and insuperable difficulty about it. As 
an Idealist, Dr. McTaggart has to admit that the 
whole physical world, in so far as it exists at all, 
must exist in and for some consciousness. Now, 
not only is there, according to him, no single mind 
in which the system can exist as a whole, but even 
all the minds together do not apparently know the 
whole of it, or (so far as our knowledge goes) ever will. 
The undiscovered and unknown part of the Universe 
is then non-existent. And yet, be it noticed, the 
known part of the world does not make a perfectly 
articulated or (if you like the phrase) organic system 
without the unknown part. It is only on the 
assumption of relations between what we know and 
what we don't know that we can regard it as an 
orderly, intelligible system at all. Therefore, if 
part of the system is non-existent, the whole system 
— the system as a whole — must be treated as non- 
existent. The world is, we are told, a system ; and 
yet as a system it has (upon the hypothesis) no real 
existence. The systematic whole does not exist 
in matter, for to Dr. McTaggart matter is merely 
the experience of Mind. What sort of existence, 
then, can an undiscovered planet possess till it is 



iv.J DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 99 

discovered ? For Dr. McTaggart has not provided 
any mind or minds in and for which it is to exist. 
At one time, indeed, Dr. McTaggart seemed disposed 
to accept a suggestion of mine that, on his view, 
each soul must be omniscient ; and to admit that, 
while in its temporal aspect, each soul is limited 
and fallible in its knowledge, it is at the same time 
supertemporally omniscient. That is a conception 
difficult beyond all the difficulties of the most 
arbitrary and self-contradicting of orthodox patristic 
or scholastic speculations. But, as Dr. McTaggart 
does not now seem disposed to insist upon that 
point, I will say no more about it except that to 
my mind it is a theory which defies all intellectual 
grasp. It can be stated ; it cannot be thought. 

Further, I would remind you, the theory is open 
to all the objections which I urged against the Pre- 
existence theory in its pluralistic form. I have 
suggested the difficulties involved in the facts of 
heredity — the difficulty of understanding how 
souls whose real intellectual and moral character- 
istics are uncaused and eternal should be assigned 
to parents so far resembling them as to lead almost 
inevitably to the inference that the characteristics 
of the children are to some extent causally connected 
with those of the parents.^ Now the Pluralist can 

1 1 use the word ' causally connected ' in the popular or scientific senseoi 
the word, to indicate merely an actually observed psycho-physical law. 



100 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

at least urge that for this purpose ingenious arrange- 
ments are contrived by God — by the One Spirit 
whom he regards as incomparably the wisest and 
most powerful in the Universe. Dr. McTaggart 
recognizes no iatelligence capable of grappling with 
such a problem or succession of problems. But 
this particular matter of the assignment of souls 
to bodies is only a particular application of a wider 
difficulty. Dr. McTaggart contends that the Uni- 
verse constitutes not merely a physical but a moral 
order. He would not deny that the Universe means 
something ; that the series of events tends towards 
an end, an end which is also a good ; that it has a 
purpose and a final cause. And yet this purpose 
exists in no mind whatever, and is due to no will 
whatever — except to the very small extent to which 
the processes of physical nature can be consciously 
directed to an end by the volitions of men and 
similarly limited intelligences. As a whole, the 
Universe is purposed and willed by no single will or 
combination of wills. I confess I do not understand 
the idea of a purpose which operates, but is not the 
purpose of a Mind which is also a Will. All the 
considerations upon which I dwelt to show the 
necessity of such a Will to account for the Universe 
which we know, are so many arguments against Dr. 
McTaggart's scheme. The events of Dr. McTaggart's 
Universe are, upon the view of Causality which I 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 101 

attempted to defend in my second lecture, uncaused 
events. 

Nevertheless, as a Philosopher, I am deeply- 
grateful to Dr. McTaggart. Not only does his 
scheme on its practical side seem to me preferable 
to many systems which sound more orthodox — 
systems of vague pantheistic Theism in which 
MoraUty is treated as mere 'appearance' and personal 
Immortality dehberately rejected — but it has done 
much intellectually to clear the air. Dr. McTaggart 
seems to me right in holding that, if God or the 
Absolute is to include in itself all other spirits, and 
yet the personality or self-consciousness of those 
spirits is not to be denied, then this Absolute in 
which they are to be included cannot reasonably 
be thought of as a conscious being, or invested 
with the other attributes usually implied by the 
term God. 

And this leads me to say a few words more in 
explanation of my own view of the relation be- 
tween God and human or other souls. To me, as 
I have already intimated, it seems simply mean- 
ingless to speak of one consciousness as included 
in another consciousness. The essence of a con- 
sciousness is to be for itself : whether it be a thought, 
a feeling, or an emotion, the essence of that conscious- 
ness is what it is for me. Every moment of con- 
sciousness is unique. Another being may have a 



102 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

similar feeling : in that case there are two feelings, 
and not one. Another mind may know what I 
feel, but the knowledge of another's agony is (for- 
tunately) a very different thing from the agony 
itself. It is fashionable in some quarters to ridicule 
the idea of ' impenetrable ' souls. If ' impenetrable ' 
means that another soul cannot know what goes on 
in my soul, I do not assert that the soul is impene- 
trable. I believe that God knows what occurs in 
my soul in an infinitely completer way than that in 
which any human being can know it. Further, I 
believe that every soul is kept in existence from 
moment to moment by a continuous act of the 
divine Will, and so is altogether dependent upon 
that Will, and forms part of one system with Him. 
On the other hand I believe that (through the 
analogy of my own mind and the guidance of the 
moral consciousness) I do know, imperfectly and 
inadequately, ' as in a mirror darkly,' what goes on 
in God's Mind. But, if penetrability is to mean 
identity, the theory that souls are penetrable seems 
to me mainly unintelligible. The acceptance which 
it meets with in some quarters is due, I believe, 
wholly to the influence of that most fertile source 
of philosophical confusion — misapplied spacial meta- 
phor.i It seems easy to talk about a mind being 

1 In part, perhaps, also to a mistaken theory of predication, which 
assumes that, because every fact in the world can be represented as 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 103 

something in itself, and yet part of another mind, 
because we are familiar with the idea of things in 
space forming part of larger things in space — Chinese 
boxes, for instance, shut up in bigger ones. Such a 
mode of thought is wholly inapplicable to minds 
which are not in space at all. Space is in the mind : 
the mind is not in space. A mind is not a thing 
which can be round or square : you can't say that 
the intellect of Kant or of Lord Kelvin measures so 
many inches by so many : equally impossible is it to 
talk about such an intellect being a part of a more 
extensive intellect. 

The theory of an all-inclusive Deity has recently 
been adopted and popularized by Mr. Campbell,^ 
who has done all that rhetorical skill combined with 
genuine religious earnestness can do to present it in 
an attractive and edifying dress. And yet the same 
Logic which leads to the assertion that the Saint 
is part of God, leads also to the assertion that Csesar 
Borgia and Napoleon Buonaparte and all the wicked 
Popes who have ever been white-washed by epis- 
copal or other historians are also parts of God. 
How can I worship, how can I strive to be like, 
how can I be the better for believing in or revering 

logically a predicate of Reality at large, therefore there is but one 
Substance or (metaphysically) Real Being in the world, of which all 
other existences are really mere ' attributes.' But this theory cannot 
be discussed here. 
1 In The New Theology. 



104 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

a Being of whom Csesar Borgia is a part as completely 
and entirely as St. Paul or our Lord himself ? 
Hindoo Theology is consistent in this matter. It 
worships the destructive and the vicious aspects 
of Brahma as much as the kindly and the moral 
ones : it does not pretend that God is revealed in 
the Moral Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or 
one-sided way a God of Love. If it be an ' ethical 
obsession ' (as has been suggested) to object to treat 
Immorality as no less a revelation of God than 
Morality, I must plead guilty to such an obsession. 
And yet without such an ' obsession ' I confess I 
do not see what is left of Christianity. There is 
only one way out of the difi&culty. If we are all 
parts of God, we can only call God good or perfect 
by maintaining that the deliverances of our moral 
consciousness have no validity for God, and there- 
fore can tell us nothing about him. That has been 
done deliberately and explicitly by some Philo- 
sophers : ^ the distinguished Theologians who echo 
the language of this Philosophy have fortunately 
for their own religious life and experience, but 
imfortunately for their philosophical consistency, 
declined to follow in their steps. A God who is 
' beyond good and evil,' can be no fitting object of 

1 IJ.g. by Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality and still more 
uncompromisingly by Professor A. E. Taylor in The Problem of 
Conduct, but I rejoice to find that the latter very able writer has 
recently given up this theory of a ' super-moral ' Absolute, 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 105 

worship to men who wish to become good, just, 
merciful. If the cosmic process be indiflferent to 
these ethical considerations, we had better (with 
honest Agnostics like Professor Huxley) make up 
our minds to defy it, whether it call itself God or not. 
But it is not so much on account of its conse- 
quences as on account of its essential unmeaning- 
ness and intellectual unintelligibility that I would 
invite you to reject this formula ' God is all.' Cer- 
tainly, the Universe is an ordered system : there is 
nothing in it that is not done by the Will of God. 
And some parts of this Universe — the spiritual 
parts of it and particularly the higher spirits — are 
not mere creations of God's will. They have a 
resemblance of nature to Him. I do not object to 
your saying that at bottom there is but one Sub- 
stance in the Universe, if you will only keep clear of 
the materialistic and spacial association of the word 
Substance : but it is a Substance which reveals 
itself in many different consciousnesses. The theory 
of an all-inclusive Consciousness is not necessary to 
make possible the idea of close and intimate com- 
munion between God and men, or of the revelation 
in and to Humanity of the thought of God. On 
the contrary, it is the idea of Identity which destroys 
the possibility of communion. Communion implies 
two minds : a mind cannot have communion with 
itself or with part of itself. The two may also in a 



106 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

sense be one ; of course all beings are ultimately 
part of one Universe or Reality : but that Reality 
is not one Consciousness. The Universe is a unity, 
but the unity is not of the kind which constitutes 
a person or a self-consciousness. It is (as Dr. 
McTaggart holds) the unity of a Society, but of a 
Society (as I have attempted to argue) which 
emanates from, and is controlled by and guided 
to a preconceived end by, a single rational Will.^ 

(5) The, intuitive theory of religious knowledge. 
In other quarters objection will probably be taken 
to my not having recognized the possibility of an 
immediate knowledge of God, and left the idea of 
God to be inferred by intellectual processes which, 
when fully thought out, amount to a Metaphysic. 
It will be suggested that to make religious belief 
dependent upon Reason is to make it impossible 
to any but trained Philosophers or Theologians. 
Now there is no doubt a great attractiveness in the 
theory which makes belief in God depend simply 
upon the immediate afl&rmation of the individual's 
own consciousness. It would be more difficult to 
argue against such a theory of immediate knowledge 
or intuition if we foinad that the consciousness of 
all or most individuals does actually reveal to them 

1 I think it desirable to mention here that Professor Watson's 
account of my views in his Philosophical Basis of Religion completely 
misrepresents my real position. I have replied to his criticisms in 
Mind, N.S. No. 69 (Jan, 1909). 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 107 

the existence of God : though after all the fact 
that a number of men draw the same inference 
from given facts does not show that it is not an 
inference. You will sometimes find Metaphysicians 
contending that nobody is really an Atheist, since 
everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in 
contact with an Other of which he is nevertheless 
a part. I do not deny that, if you water down the 
idea of God to the notion of a vague ' something 
not ourselves,' you may possibly make out that 
everybody is explicitly or implicitly a believer 
in such a Deity. 

I should prefer myself to say that, if that is all 
you mean by God, it does not much matter whether 
we believe in Him or not. In the sense in which 
God is understood by Christianity or Judaism or any 
other theistic Religion it is unfortunately impossible 
to contend that everybody is a Theist. And, if there 
is an immediate knowledge of God in every human 
soul, this would be difficult to account for. Neither 
the cultivated nor the uncultivated Chinaman has 
apparently any such belief. The ignorant China- 
man believes in a sort of luck or destiny — possibly 
in a plurality of limited but more or less mischievous 
spirits : the educated Chinaman, we are told, is for 
the most part a pure Agnostic. And Chinamen are 
believed to be one-fifth of the human race. The task 
of the Missionary would be an easier one if he could 



108 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

appeal to any such widely diffused intuitions of God. 
The Missionary, from the days of St. Paul at Athens 
down to the present, has to begin by arguing with his 
opponents in favour of Theism, and then to go on to 
argue from Theism to Christianity. I do not deny 
— on the contrary I strongly contend — that the 
rational considerations which lead up to Monotheism 
are so manifold, and lie so near at hand, that at a 
certain stage of mental development we find that 
belief independently asserting itself with more or less 
fullness in widely distant regions of time and space ; 
while traces of it are found almost everywhere — even 
among savages — side by side with other and incon- 
sistent beliefs. But even among theistic nations 
an immediate knowledge of God is claimed by very 
few. If there is a tendency on the part of the more 
strongly religious minds to claim it, it is explicitly 
disclaimed by others — by most of the great School- 
men, and in modem times by profoundly religious 
minds such as Newman or Martineau. Its existence 
is in fact denied by most of the great theological 
systems — Catholic, Protestant, Anglican. Theolo- 
gians always begin by arguing in favour of the 
existence of God. And even among the religious 
minds without philosophical training which do claim 
such immediate knowledge, their creed is most often 
due (as is obvious to the outside observer) to the 
influence of environment, of education, of social 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 109 

tradition. For the religious person who claims such 
knowledge of God does not generally stop at the 
bare affirmation of God's existence : he goes on to 
claim an immediate knowledge of all sorts of other 
things — ideas clearly derived from the traditional 
teaching of his religious community. The Protestant 
of a certain type will claim immediate consciousness 
of ideas about the forgiveness of sins which are 
palpably due to the teaching of Luther or St. 
Augustine, and to the influence of this or that 
preacher who has transmitted those ideas to him 
or to his mother : while the Catholic, though his 
training discourages such claims, will sometimes see 
visions which convey to him an immediate assurance 
of the truth of the Immaculate Conception. Even 
among Anglicans we find educated men who claim 
to know by immediate intuition the truth of historical 
facts alleged to have occurred in the first century, 
or dogmatic truths such as the complicated niceties 
of the Athanasian Creed. These claims to immediate 
insight thus refute themselves by the inconsistent 
character of the knowledge claimed. An attempt 
may be made to extract from all these immediate 
certainties a residual element which is said to be 
common to all of them. The attempt has been made 
by Professor James in that rather painful work, the 
Varieties of Religious Experience. And the residuum 
turns out to be something so vague that, if not ab- 



no PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

solutely worthless, it is almost incapable of being 
expressed ia articulate language, and constitutes a 
very precarious foundation for a working religious 
creed. 

The truth is that the uneducated — or rather the 
unanalytical, perhaps I ought to say the meta- 
physically untrained — human mind has a tendency 
to regard as an immediate certainty any truth 
which it strongly believes and regards as very 
important. Such minds do not know the psycho- 
logical causes which have led to their own belief, 
when they are due to psychological causes : they 
have not analysed the processes of thought by which 
they have been led to those beliefs which are really 
due to the working of their own minds. Most 
uncultivated persons would probably be very much 
surprised to hear that the existence of the friend 
with whose body they are in physical contact is 
after all only an inference.^ But surely, in the 
man who has discovered that such is the case, 
the warmth of friendship was never dimmed by 
the reflection that his knowledge of his friend is 
not immediate but mediate. It is a mere pre- 
judice to suppose that mediate knowledge is in any 

1 TMs is sometimes denied by Philosophers, but I have never been 
able to understand on what grounds. If I know a priori the 
existence of other men, I ought to be able to say a priori how many 
they are and to say something about them. And this is more than 
any one claims. 



iv.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 111 

way less certain, less intimate, less trustworthy 
or less satisfying than immediate knowledge. If 
we claim for man the possibility of just such a know- 
ledge of God as a man may possess of his brother 
man, surely that is all that is wanted to make possible 
the closest religious communion. It is from the 
existence of my own self that I infer the existence 
of other selves, whom I observe to behave in a manner 
resembling my own behaviour. It is by an only 
slightly more difficult and complicated inference 
from my own consciousness that I rise to that 
conception of a universal Consciousness which 
supplies me with at once the simplest and the most 
natural explanation both of my own existence and 
of the existence of the Nature which I see around 
me. 

(6) Religion and Psychology. I do not deny that 
the study of religious history, by exhibiting the 
naturalness and universality of religious ideas and 
religious emotions, may rationally create a pre- 
disposition to find some measure of truth in every 
form of religious belief. But I would venture to 
add a word of caution against the tendency fashion- 
able in many quarters to talk of basing religious 
belief upon Psychology. The business of Psychology 
is to tell us what actually goes on in the human mind. 
It cannot possibly tell us whether the beliefs which 
are found there are true or false. An erroneous 



112 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

belief is as much a psychological fact as a true one. 
A theory which goes on, by inference from what 
we observe in our own minds, to construct a theory 
of the Universe necessarily involves a Metaphysic, 
conscious or unconscious. It may be urged that 
the reality of religious experience is unaffected by the 
question whether the beliefs associated with it are 
true or false. That is the case, so long as the beliefs 
are supposed to be true by the person in question. 
But, when once the spirit of enquiry is aroused, a 
man cannot be — and I venture to think ought not 
to be — satisfied as to the truth of his belief simply 
by being told that the beliefs are actually there. 

It may be contended, no doubt, that religious 
experience does not mean merely a state of intel- 
lectual belief, but certain emotions, aspirations, 
perhaps (to take one particular type of religious 
experience) a consciousness of love met by answering 
love. To many who undergo such experiences, 
they seem to carry with them an immediate assurance 
of the existence of the Being with whom they feel 
themselves to be in communion. That, on the 
intellectual presuppositions of the particular person, 
seems to be the natural — it may be the only possible 
—way of explaining the feeling. But even there 
the belief is not really immediate : it is an inference 
from what is actually matter of experience. And 
it is, unhappily, no less a matter of well-ascertained 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 113 

psychological fact that, when intellectual doubt is 
once aroused, such experiences no longer carry with 
them this conviction of their own objective basis. 
The person was really under the influence of an 
intellectual theory all along, whether the theory 
was acquired by hereditary tradition, by the influ- 
ence of another's mind, or by personal thought and 
reflection. When the intellectual theory alters, 
the same kind of experience is no longer possible. 
I will not attempt to say how far it is desirable 
that persons who are perfectly satisfied with a creed 
which they have never examined should (as it were) 
pull up the roots of their own faith to see how deep 
they go. I merely want to point out that the occur- 
rence of certain emotional experiences, though un- 
doubtedly they may constitute part of the data of 
a religious argument, cannot be held to constitute 
in and by themselves sufficient evidence for the 
truth of the intellectual theory connected with them 
in the mind of the person to whom they occur. 
They do not always present themselves as sufficient 
evidence for their truth even to the person experi- 
encing them — still less can they do so to others. 
Equally unreasonable is it to maintain, with a certain 
class of religious philosophers, that the religious 
experience by itself is all we want ; and to assume 
that we may throw to the winds all the theological 
or other beliefs which have actually been associated 

H 



114 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

with the various types of religious experience, and 
yet continue to have those experiences and find them 
no less valuable and no less satisfying. If there is 
one thing which the study of religious Psychology 
testifies to, it is the fact that the character of the 
religious experience (though there may be certain 
common elements in it) varies very widely with 
the character of the theoretical belief with which 
it is associated — a belief of which it is sometimes 
the cause, sometimes the effect, but from which it 
is always inseparable. The Buddhist's religious 
experiences are not possible to those who hold the 
Christian's view of the Universe : the Christian's 
religious experiences are not possible to one who 
holds the Buddhist theory of the Universe. You 
cannot have an experience of communion with a 
living Being when you disbelieve in the existence 
of such a Being. And a man's theories of the 
Universe always at bottom imply a Metaphysic of 
some kind — conscious or unconscious. 

Sometimes the theory of a Religion which shall 
be purely psychological springs from pure ignorance 
as to the meaning of the terms actually employed 
by the general usage of philosophers. Those who 
talk in this way mean by Psychology what, ac- 
cording to the ordinary philosophic usage, is really 
Metaphysic. For Metaphysic is simply the science 
which deals with the ultimate nature of the Universe. 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 115 

At other times attempts are made by people of 
more or less philosophical culture to justify their 
theory. The most widely influential of such attempts 
is the one made by M. Auguste Sabatier.^ This 
attempt has at least this much in its favour — that 
it is not so much to the ordinary experience of 
average men and women that M. Sabatier appeals 
as to the exceptional experiences of the great 
religious minds. He lays the chief stress upon 
those exceptional moments of religious history when 
a new religious idea entered into the mind of some 
prophet or teacher, e.g. the unity of God, the Father- 
hood of God, the brotherhood of Man. Here, just 
because the idea was new, it cannot (he contends) 
be accounted for by education or environment or 
any other of the psychological causes which obviously 
determine the traditional beliefs of the great majority. 
These new ideas, therefore, he assumes to be due to 
immediate revelation or inspiration from God. Now 
it is obvious that, even if this inference were well 
grounded, it assumes that we have somehow arrived 
independent!}' at a conception of God to which such 
inspirations can be referred. The Psychology of 
the human mind cannot assume the existence of 
such a Being : if we infer such a Being from our 
own mental experience, that is not immediate but 

1 In Esquisse d'une Philosophic de la Religion d'apres La Psycho- 
logic ei I'histoire. 



116 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

mediate knowledge. It is a belief based on inference, 
and a belief which is, properly speaking, meta- 
physical. The idea of a Religion which is merely 
based upon Psychology and involves nothing else 
is a delusion : all the great Religions of the world 
have been, among other things, metaphysical systems. 
We have no means of ascertaiaing their truth but 
Reason, whether it assume the form of a rough 
common-sense or of elaborate reasoning which not 
only is Metaphysic but knows itself to be so. Reason 
is then the organ of religious truth. But then, let 
me remind you. Reason includes our moral Reason. 
That really is a faculty of immediate knowledge ; 
and it is a faculty which, in a higher or lower state 
of development, is actually found in practically all 
human beings. The one element of truth which I 
recognize in the theory of an immediate knowledge 
of God is the truth that the most important data 
upon which we base the inference which leads to 
the knowledge of God are those supplied by the 
immediate judgements or intuitions of the Moral 
Consciousness. 

And here let me caution you against a very preva- 
lent misunderstanding about the word Reason. It 
is assumed very often that Reason means nothing but 
inference. That is not what we mean when we 
refer moral judgements to the Reason. We do not 
mean that we can prove that things are right or 



IV. J DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 117 

wrong : we mean precisely the opposite — that 
ultimate moral truth is immediate, like the truth 
that two and two make four. It might, of course, 
be contended that the same Reason which assures 
me that goodness is worth having and that the whole 
is greater than the part, assures us no less immedi- 
ately of the existence of God. I can only say that 
I am sure I have no such immediate knowledge, 
and that for the most part that knowledge is 
never claimed by people who understand clearly 
the difference between immediate knowledge and 
inference. The idea of God is a complex conception, 
based, not upon this or that isolated judgement or 
momentary experience, but upon the whole of our 
experience taken together. It is a hj^othesis sug- 
gested by, and necessary to, the explanation of our 
experience as a whole. Some minds may lay most 
stress upon the religious emotions themselves ; 
others upon the experience of the outer world, upon 
the appearances of design, or upon the metaphysical 
argument which shows them the inconceivability 
of matter without mrad ; others, again, may be most 
impressed by the impossibility of accounting in any 
way for the immediate consciousness of duty and 
the conviction of objective validity or authority 
which that consciousness carries with it. But in 
any case the knowledge, when it is a reasonable 
belief and not based merely upon authority, involves 



118 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

inference — Just like our knowledge of our friend's 
existence. The fact that my friend is known to me 
by experience does not prevent his communicating 
his mind to me. I shall try to show you in my next 
lecture that to admit that our knowledge of God 
is based upon inference is not incompatible with the 
belief that God has spoken to man face to face, as 
a man speaketh to his friend. 

At this point it may perhaps be well, for the sake 
of clearness, to summarize the position to which I 
have tried to lead you. I have tried to show that 
the material Universe cannot reasonably be thought 
of as having any existence outside, or independently 
of. Mind. It certaialy does not exist merely in any 
or all of the human and similar minds whose know- 
ledge is fleeting, and which have, there is every 
reason to believe, a beguining in time. We are 
bound then to infer the existence of a single Mind 
or Consciousness, which must be thought of as 
containing all the elements of our own Conscious- 
ness — Reason or Thought, Feeling, and Will — 
though no doubt in Him those elements or aspects 
of Consciousness are combined in a manner of which 
our own minds can give us but a very faint and 
analogical idea. The world must be thought of as 
ultimately the thought or experience of this Mind, 
which we call God. And this Mind must be thought 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 119 

of as not only a Thinker, but also as a Cause or a Will. 
Our own and all other minds, no less than the events 
of the material Universe, owe their beginning and 
continuance to this divine Will : in them the thought 
or experience of the divine Mind is reproduced in 
various degrees ; and to all of them is communicated 
some portion of that causality or activity of which 
God is the ultimate source, so that their acts must 
be regarded as due mediately to them, ultimately to 
God. But, though these minds are wholly dependent 
upon and in intimate connexion with the divine 
Mind, they cannot be regarded as 'parts of the divine 
Consciousness. Reality consists of God and all the 
minds that He wills to exist, together with the world 
of Nature which exists in and for those minds. 
Reality is the system or society of spirits and their 
experience. The character and ultimate purpose 
of the divine Mind is revealed to us, however in- 
adequately or imperfectly, in the moral conscious- 
ness ; and the moral ideal which is thus communi- 
cated to us makes it reasonable for us to expect, 
for at least the higher of the dependent or created 
minds, a continuance, of their individual existence, 
after physical death. Pain, sin, and other evils 
must be regarded as necessary incidents in the 
process by which the divine Will is bringing about 
the greatest attainable good of all conscious beings. 
The question whether our material Universe, con- 



120 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

sidered as the object of Mind, has a begiiming and 
will have an end, is one which we have no data for 
deciding. Time-distinctions, I think, must be regarded 
as objective — that is to say, as forming part of the 
nature and constitution of the real world ; but the 
antinomy involved either in supposing an endless 
succession or a beginning and end of the time-series 
is one which our intellectual faculties are, or at least 
have so far proved, incapable of solving. The 
element of inadequacy and uncertainty which the 
admission of this antinomy introduces into our 
theory of the Universe is an emphatic reminder to 
us of the inadequate and imperfect character of all 
our knowledge. The knowledge, however, that we 
possess, though inadequate knowledge, is real know- 
ledge — not a sham knowledge of merely relative or 
human vaHdity ; and is sufficient not only for the 
guidance of life but even for the partial, though 
not the complete, satisfaction of one of the noblest 
impulses of the human mind — the disinterested 
passion for truth. ' Now we see in a mirror 
darkly ' ; but still we see. 

The view of the Universe which I have endeavoured 
very inadequately to set before you is a form of 
Idealism. Inasmuch as it recognizes the existence 
— though not the separate and independent exist- 
ence — of many persons; inasmuch as it regards 
both God and man as persons, without attempting 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 121 

to merge the existence of either in one all-including, 
comprehensive consciousness, it may further be 
described as a form of ' personal Idealism.' But, 
if any one finds it easier to think of material Nature 
as having an existence which, though dependent 
upon and willed by the divine Mind, is not simply 
an existence in and for mind, such a view of the Uni- 
verse will serve equally well as a basis of ReHgion. 
For rehgious purposes it makes no difference whether 
we think of Nature as existing in the Mind of God, 
or as simply created or brought into and kept in 
existence by that Mind. When you have subtracted 
from the theistic case every argument that depends 
for its force upon the theory that the idea of matter 
without Mind is an unthinkable absurdity, enough 
will remain to show the unreasonableness of supposing 
that in point of fact matter ever has existed without 
being caused and controlled by Mind. The argu- 
ment for Idealism may, I hope, have at all events 
exhibited incidentally the groundlessness and im- 
probability of materialistic and naturalistic assump- 
tions, and left the way clear for the establishment 
of Theism by the arguments which rest upon the 
, discovery that Causality implies volition ; upon the 
appearances of intelligence in organic life ; upon the 
existence of the moral consciousness; and more 
generally upon the enormous probability that the 
ultimate Source of Reality should resemble rather 



122 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

the highest than the lowest kind of existence of 
which we have experience. That ReaHty as a whole 
may be most reasonably interpreted by Reality at 
its highest is after all the sum and substance of all 
theistic arguments. If anybody finds it easier to 
think of matter as uncreated but as always guided 
and controlled by Mind, I do not think there will 
be any religious objection to such a position ; though 
it is, as it seems to me, intellectually a less un- 
assailable position than is afforded by an Idealism 
of the type which I have most inadequately sketched. 
Mr. Bradley in a cynical moment has defined 
Metaphysics as the ' finding of bad reasons for what 
we believe upon instinct.' I do not for myself accept 
that definition, which Mr. Bradley himself would 
not of course regard as expressing the whole truth of 
the matter. But, though I am firmly convinced that 
it is possible to find good reasons for the religious 
beliefs and hopes which have in fact inspired the 
noblest lives, I still feel that the greatest service 
which even a little acquaintance with Philosophy 
may render to many who have not the time for any 
profounder study of it, will be to give them greater 
boldness and confidence in accepting a view of the 
Universe which satisfies the instinctive or unanalysed 
demands of their moral, intellectual, and spiritual 
nature. 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 123 



NOTE ON NON-THEISTIO IDEALISM 

It may perhaps be well for the sake of greater clearness to 
summarize my objections— those already mentioned and some 
others— to the system of Dr. McTaggart, which I admit to be, 
for one who has accepted the idealistic position that matter 
does not exist apart from Mind, the only intelligible alternative 
to Theism. His theory is, it will be remembered, that ultimate 
Reality consists of a system of selves or spirits, uncreated and 
eternal, forming together a Unity, but not a conscious Unity, 
so that consciousness exists only in the separate selves, not 
in the whole : 

(1) It is admitted that the material world exists only in 
and for Mind. There is no reason to think that any human 
mind, or any of the other minds of which Dr. McTaggart's 
Universe is composed, knows the whole of this world. What 
kind of existence then have the parts of the Universe which 
are not known to any mind ? It seems to me that Dr. 
McTaggart would be compelled to admit that they do not 
exist at all. The world postulated by Science would thus 
be admitted to be a delusion. This represents a subjective 
Idealism of an extreme and staggering kind which cannot 
meet the objections commonly urged against all Idealism. 

(2) Moreover, the world is not such an intellectually com- 
plete system as Dr. McTaggart insists that it must be, apart 
from the relations of its known parts to its unknown parts. 
If there are parts which are unknown to any mind, and which 
therefore do not exist at all, it is not a system at all. 

(3) If it be said that all the spirits between them know 
the world — one knowing one part, another another — thia 
is a mere hypothesis, opposed to all the probabilities 
suggested by experience, and after all would be a very 
inadequate answer to our difl&culties. Dr. McTaggart insists 



124 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

that the world of existing things exists as a system. Such 
existence to an Idealist must mean existence for a mind ; 
a system not known as a system to any mind whatever could 
hardly be said to exist at aU. 

(4) If it be suggested (as Dr. McTaggart was at one time 
inclined to suggest) that every mind considered as a timeless 
Noumenon is omniscient, though in its phenomenal and 
temporal aspect its knowledge is intermittent and always 
limited, I reply (a) the theory seems to me not only gratuitous 
but imintelligible, and (6) it is open to all the difficulties and 
objections of the theory that time and change are merely 
subjective delusions. This is too large a question to discuss 
here : I can only refer to the treatment of the subject by such 
writers as Lotze (see above) and M. Bergson. I may also 
refer to Mr. Bradley's argument {Appearance and Reality, 
p. 50 sq.) against the theory that the individual Ego is out 
of time. 

(5) The theory of pre-existent souls is opposed to aU the 
probabilities suggested by experience. Soul and organism 
are connected in such a way that the pre-existence of one 
element in what presents itself and works in our world as 
a unity is an extremely difficult supposition, and involves 
assumptions which reduce to a minimum the amount of 
identity or continuity that could be claimed for the Ego 
throughout its successive lives. A soul which has forgotten 
all its previous experiences may have some identity with 
its previous state, but not much. Moreover, we should 
have to suppose that the correspondence of a certain type of 
body with a certain kind of soul, as well as the resemblance 
between the individual and his parents, implies no kind of 
causal connexion, but is due to mere accident ; or, if it is not 
to accident, to a very arbitrary kind of pre-established harmony 
which there is nothing in experience to suggest, and which 
(upon Dr. McTaggart's theory) there is no creative intelligence 
to pre-establish. The theory cannot be absolutely refuted, 
but aU Dr. McTaggart's ingenuity has not — to my own mind, 



IV.] DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS 125 

and (I feel sure) to most minds — made it seem otherwise than 
extremely difficult and improbable. Its sole recommendation 
is that it makes possible an Idealism without Theism : but, 
if Theism be an easier and more defensible theory, that is no 
recommendation at all. 

(6) Dr. McTaggart's whole theory seems to me to waver 
between two inconsistent views of Reality. When he insists 
that the world consists of a system or Unity, he tends towards 
a view of things which makes the system of intellectual 
relations constituting knowledge or Science to be the very 
reality of things : on such a view there is no impossibility of 
an ultimate Reality not known to any one mind. But Dr. 
McTaggart has too strong a hold on the conviction of the 
supremely real character of conscious mind and the unreality 
of mere abstractions to be satisfied with this view. If there is 
no mind which both knows and wills the existence and the 
mutual relations of the spirits, the supreme reality must be 
found in the individual spirits themselves ; yet the system, if 
known to none of them, seems to fall outside the reality. The 
natural tendency of a system which finds the sole reality in 
eternally self-existent souls is towards Pluralism — a theory of 
wholly independent ' Reals ' or ' Monads.' Dr. McTaggart is 
too much of a Hegelian to acquiesce in such a view. The 
gulf between the two tendencies seems to me — with aU 
respect— to be awkwardly bridged over by the assumption 
that the separate selves form an intelligible system, which 
nevertheless no one really existent spirit actually understands. 
If a system of relations can be Reality, there is no ground for 
assumiag the pre-existence or eternity of individual souls : if 
on the other hand Reality is ' experience,' an unexperienced 
' system ' cannot be real, and the ' unity ' disappears. This is 
a line of objection which it would require a much more 
thorough discussion to develope. 

(7) On the view which I myself hold as to the nature of 
Causality, the only intelligible cause of events is a Will. 
The events of Dr. McTaggart's world (putting aside the very 



126 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

small proportion which are due, in part at least, to the volun- 
tary action of men or spirits) are not caused at all. His 
theory is therefore open to all — and more than all — the objec- 
tions which I have urged in Lecture II. against the theory 
which explains the Universe as the thought of a Mind but 
not as caused by that Mind. 

(8) It is just possible that some one might suggest that the 
first of my objections might be met by the allegation that 
there is nothing in the scheme which forbids us to suppose 
that the whole of Nature is known to more than one of the 
spirits which make up Eeality, though not to all, or indeed any, 
of the human and non-human spirits known to us. I should 
reply (a) that the considerations which lead to the hypothesis 
of one omniscient Being do not require more than one such 
spirit, and entia non sunt muUiplicanda prceter necessitatem ; 
(b) such a scheme would still be open to Objection 7. If it 
is a speculative possibility that all Nature may exist in the 
knowledge of more than one spirit, it cannot well be thought 
of as willed by more than one spirit. If the Universe, 
admitted to form an ordered system, is caused by rational 
will at all, it must surely be caused by one Will. But 
perhaps a serious discussion of a polytheistic scheme such as 
this may be postponed till it is seriously maintained. It has 
not been suggested, so far as I am aware, by Dr. McTaggart 
himself. 

(9) The real strength of Dr. McTaggart's system must be 
measured by the validity of his objections to a Theism such 
as I have defended. I have attempted to reply to those 
objections in the course of these Lectures, and more at length 
in a review of his Some Dogmas of Religion in Mind (N.S.), 
vol. XV., 1906. 



v.] REVELATION 127 



LECTURE V 

REVELATION 

I HAVE tried in previous lectures to show that the 
apprehension of rehgious truth does not depend upon 
some special kind of intuition ; that it is not due to 
some special faculty superior to and different in 
kind from our ordinary intellectual activities, but 
to an exercise of the same intellectual faculties by 
which we attain to truth in other matters — including, 
however, especially the wholly unique faculty of 
immediately discerning values or pronouncing moral 
judgements. The word ' faith ' should, as it seems to 
me, be used to express not a mysterious capacity for 
attaining to knowledge without thought or without 
evidence, but to indicate some of the manifold 
characteristics by which our religious knowledge 
is distinguished from the knowledge either of 
common life or of the physical Sciences. If I had 
time there would be much to be said about these 
characteristics, and I think I could show that the 
popular distinction between knowledge and religious 



128 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

faith finds whatever real justification it possesfses 
in these characteristics of religious knowledge. I 
might insist on the frequently implicit and unanalysed 
character of religious thinking ; upon the incom- 
pleteness and inadequacy of even the fullest account 
that the maturest and acutest Philosopher can give 
of ultimate Reality ; upon the merely probable and 
analogical character of much of the reasoning which 
is necessarily employed both in the most popular 
and in the most philosophical kinds of reasoning 
about such matters; and above all upon the prominent 
place which moral judgements occupy in religious 
thought, moral judgements which, on account of their 
immediate character and their emotional setting, are 
often not recognized in their true character as judge- 
ments of the Reason. Most of the mistakes into which 
popular thinking has fallen in this matter — the 
mistakes which culminate in the famous examina- 
tion-paper definition of faith as ' a means of believing 
that which we know not to be true ' — would be 
avoided if we would only remember, with St. Paul 
and most of the greater religious thinkers, that the 
true antithesis is not between faith and reason but 
between faith and sight. All religious belief implies 
a belief in something which cannot be touched or 
tasted or handled, and which cannot be established 
by any mere logical deduction from what can be 
touched or tasted or handled. So far from implying 



v.] KEVELATION 129 

scepticism as to the power of Reason, this opposition 
between faith and sight actually asserts the possi- 
bility of attaining by thought to a knowledge of 
realities which cannot be touched or tasted or 
handled — a knowledge of equal validity and trust- 
worthiness with that which is popularly said to be 
due to the senses, though Plato has taught us once 
for all ^ that the senses by themselves never give us 
real knowledge, and that in the apprehension of the 
most ordinary matter of fact there is implied the 
action of the self-same intellect by which alone we 
can reach the knowledge of God. 

It may further be pointed out that, though neither 
religious knowledge nor moral knowledge are mere 
emotion, they are both of them very closely connected 
with certain emotions. Great moral discoveries are 
made, not so much by superior intellectual power, 
as by superior interest in the subject-matter of 
Morality. Very ordinary intelligence can see, when 
it is really brought to bear upon the matter, the 
irrationality or immorality of bad customs, oppres- 
sions, social injustices ; but the people who have 
led the revolt against these things have generally 
been the people who have felt intensely about them. 
So it is with the more distinctly religious know- 
ledge. Religious thought and insight are largely 
dependent upon the emotions to which religious 

1 Throughout his writings, but pre-eminently in the Thecetetus, 
I 



130 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

ideas and beliefs appeal. The absence of religious 
thought and definite religious belief is very often 
(I am far from saying always) due to a want of 
interest in Religion ; but that does not prove that 
rehgious thought is not the work of the intellect, 
any more than the fact that a man is ignorant of 
Politics because he takes no interest in Politics 
proves that political truth is a mere matter of 
emotion, and has nothing to do with the under- 
standing. Thought is always guided by interest — 
a truth which must not be distorted with a certain 
modern school of thought, if indeed it can properly 
be called thought, into the assertion that thinking 
is nothing but willing, and that therefore we are at 
liberty to think just what we please. 

And that leads on to a further point. Emotion 
and desire are very closely connected with the will. 
A man's moral insight and the development of his 
thought about moral questions depend very largely 
upon the extent to which he acts up to whatever light 
he has. Vice, as Aristotle put it, is cfyOaprcKr] dpxrj'5 
— destructive of moral first principles. Moral insight 
is largely dependent upon character. And so is 
religious insight. Thus it is quite true to say that 
religious belief depends in part upon the state of 
the will. This doctrine has been so scandalously 
abused by many Theologians and Apologists that 
I use it with great hesitation. I have no sympathy 



v.] REVELATION 131 

with the idea that we are Justified in believing a 
religious doctrine merely because we wish it to be 
true, or with the insinuation that non-belief in a 
religious truth is always or necessarily due to moral 
obliquity. But still it is undeniable that a man's 
ethical and religious beliefs are to some extent 
affected by the state of his will. That is so with all 
knowledge to some extent ; for progress in knowledge 
requires attention, and is largely dependent upon 
interest. If I take no interest in the properties of 
curves or the square root of —1, I am not very 
likely to make a good mathematician. This con- 
nexion of knowledge with interest applies in an 
exceptional degree to religious knowledge : and that 
is one of the points which I think many religious 
thinkers have intended to emphasize by their too 
hard and fast distinctions between faith and know- 
ledge. 

Belief itself is thus to some extent affected by the 
state of the will ; and still more emphatically does 
the extent to which belief affects action depend upon 
the will. Many beliefs which we quite sincerely 
hold are what have been called ' otiose beliefs ' ; we 
do not by an effort of the will realize them suffi- 
ciently strongly for them to affect action. Many a 
man knows perfectly that his course of life will injure 
or destroy his physical health ; it is not through 
intellectual scepticism that he disobeys his physi- 



132 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

cian's prescriptions, but because other desires and 
inclinations prevent his attending to them and 
acting upon them. It is obvious that to men like St. 
Paul and Luther faith meant much more than a mere 
state of the intellect ; it included a certain emotional 
and a certain volitional attitude ; it included love 
and it included obedience. Whether our intellectual 
beliefs about Religion are energetic enough to influ- 
ence action, does to an enormous extent depend upon 
our wills. Faith is, then, used, and almost in- 
evitably used, in such a great variety of senses that 
I do not like to lay down one definite and exclusive 
definition of it ; but it would be safe to say that, for 
many purposes and in many connexions, religious 
faith means the deliberate adoption by an effort of 
the will, as practically certain for purposes of action 
and of feeling, of a religious belief which to the in- 
tellect is, or may be, merely probable. For purposes 
of life it is entirely reasonable to treat probabilities 
as certainties. If a man has reason to think his 
friend is trustworthy, he will do well to trust him 
wholly and implicitly. If a man has reason to 
think that a certain view of the Universe is the 
most probable one, he will do well habitually to 
allow that conviction to dominate not merely his 
actions, but the habitual tenour of his emotional 
and spiritual life. We should not love a human 
being much if we allowed ourselves habitually to con- 



v.] REVELATION 133 

template the logical possibility that the loved one was 
unworthy of, or irresponsive to, our affection. We 
could not love God if we habitually contemplated 
the fact that His existence rests for us upon judge- 
ments in which there is more or less possibility of 
error, though there is no reason why we should, in 
our speculative moments, claim a greater certainty 
for them than seems to be reasonable. The doctrine 
that ' probability is the guide of life ' is one on which 
every sensible man habitually acts in all other rela- 
tions of life : Bishop Butler was right in contending 
that it should be applied no less unhesitatingly to 
the matter of religious behef and religious aspiration. 
The view which I have taken of the nature of 
faith may be illustrated by the position of Clement 
of Alexandria. It is clear from his writings that by 
faith he meant a kind of conviction falling short of 
demonstration or immediate intellectual insight, and 
dependent in part upon the state of the will and 
the heart. Clement did not disparage knowledge 
in the interests of faith : faith was to him a more 
elementary kind of knowledge resting largely upon 
moral conviction, and the foundation of that 
higher state of intellectual apprehension which he 
called Gnosis. I do not mean, of course, to adopt 
Clement's Philosophy as a whole ; I merely refer to 
it as illustrating the point that, properly considered, 
faith is, or rather includes, a particular kind or stage 



134 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

of knowledge, and is not a totally different and even 
opposite state of mind. It would be easy to show 
that this has been fully recognized by many, if not 
most, of the great Christian thinkers. 

One last point. It is of the utmost importance 
to distinguish between the process by which psycho- 
logically a man arrives at a religious or other truth 
and the reasons which make it true. Because I 
deny that the truth of God's existence can reasonably 
be accepted on the basis of an immediate judgement 
or intuition, I do not deny for one moment that an 
apparently intuitive conviction of the truth of 
Christianity, as of other religions, actually exists. 
The religious belief of the vast majority of persons 
has always rested, and must always rest, very largely 
upon tradition, education, environment, authority 
of one kind or another — authority supported or 
confirmed by a varying measure of independent 
reflection or experience. And, just where the influ- 
ence of authority is most complete and overwhelming, 
it is least felt to be authority. The person whose 
beliefs are most entirely produced by education or 
environment is very often most convinced that his 
opinions are due solely to his own immediate insight. 
But even where this is not the case — even where the 
religious man is taking a new departure, revolting 
against his environment and adopting a religious 
belief absolutely at variance with the established 



v] REVELATION 135 

belief of his society — I do not contend that such new 
rehgious ideas are always due to unobserved and 
unanalysed processes of reasoning. That in most 
cases, when a person adopts a new creed, he would 
himself give some reason for his change of faith is 
obvious, though the reason which he would allege 
would not in all cases be the one which really caused 
the change of religion. There may be other 
psychological influences which cause belief besides 
the influence of environment : in some cases the 
psychological causes of such beliefs are altogether 
beyond analysis. But, though I do not think 
M. Auguste Sabatier justified in assuming that a 
belief is true, and must come directly from God, 
simply because we cannot easily explain its genesis 
by the individual's environment and psychological 
antecedents, it is of extreme importance to insist 
that it is not proved to be false because it was not 
adopted primarily, or at all, on adequate theoretical 
grounds. A belief which arose at first entirely 
without logical Justification, or it may be on intel- 
lectual grounds subsequently discovered to be 
inadequate or false, may nevertheless be one which 
can and does justify itself to the reflective intellect 
of the person himself or of other persons. And 
many new, true, and valuable beliefs have undoubt- 
edly arisen in this way. Even in physical Science 
we all know that there is no Logic of discovery. It 



136 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

is a familiar criticism upon the Logic of Bacon that 
he ignored or under-estimated the part that is played 
in scientific thinking by hypothesis, and the conse- 
quent need of scientific imagination. Very often the 
new scientific idea comes into the discoverer's mind, 
he knows not how or why. Some great man of Science 
— I think, Helmholtz — said of a brilHant discovery 
of his, ' It was given to me.' But it was not true 
because it came to Helmholtz in this way, but 
because it was subsequently verified and proved. 
Now, undoubtedly, religious beliefs, new and old, 
often do present themselves to the minds of indivi- 
duals in an intuitive and unaccountable way. They 
may subsequently be justified at the bar of Reason : 
and yet Reason might never have discovered them 
for itself. They would never have come into the 
world unless they had presented themselves at first 
to some mind or other as intuitions, inspirations, 
immediate Revelations : and yet (once again) the 
fact that they so present themselves does not by itself 
prove them to be true. 

I may perhaps illustrate what I mean by the 
analogy of Poetry. I suppose few people will push 
the sound-without-sense view of Poetry to the 
length of denying that poets do sometimes see and 
teach us truths. No one — least of all one who is 
not even a verse-maker himself — can, I suppose, 
analyse the intellectual process by which a poet 



v.] REVELATION 137 

gets at his truths. The insight by which he arrives 
at them is closely connected with emotions of various 
kinds : and yet the truths are not themselves 
■emotions, nor do they in all cases merely state the 
fact that the poet has felt such and such emotions. 
They are propositions about the nature of things, 
not merely about the poet's mental states. And 
yet the truths are not true because the poet feels 
them, as he would say — no matter how passionately 
he feels them. There is no separate organ of poetic 
truth : and not all the things that poets have 
passionately felt are true. Some highly poetical 
thoughts have been very false thoughts. But, if 
they are true, they must be true for good logical 
reasons, which a philosophical critic may even in 
some cases by subsequent reflection be able to dis- 
entangle and set forth. Yet the poet did not get 
at those truths by way of philosophical reflection : 
or, if he was led to them by any logical process, 
he could not have analysed his own reasoning. 
The poet could not have produced the arguments 
of the philosopher : the philosopher without the 
poet's lead might never have seen the truth. I 
am afraid I must not stay to defend or illustrate 
this position : I will only say that the poets I 
should most naturally go to for illustration would 
be such poets as Wordsworth, Teimyson, and 
Browning, though perhaps all three are a little 



138 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

too consciously philosopliic to supply the ideal illus- 
tration. 

I do not think it will be difficult to apply these 
reflections to the case of religious and ethical truth. 
All religious truth, as I hold, depends logically upon 
inference ; inference from the whole body of our ex- 
periences, among which the most important place 
is held by our immediate moral judgements. The 
truth of Theism is ia that sense a truth discernible 
by Reason. But it does not follow that, when it 
was first discovered, it was arrived at by the infer- 
ences which I have endeavoured to some extent 
to analyse, or by one of the many liues of thought 
which may lead to the same conclusions. It was 
not the Greek philosophers so much as the Jewish 
prophets who taught the world true Monotheism. 
Hosea, Amos, the two Isaiahs probably arrived at 
their Monotheism largely by intuition ; or (in so far 
as it was by inferential processes) the premisses of 
their argument were very probably inherited beliefs 
of earlier Judaism which would not commend them- 
selves without qualification to a modern thinker. 
In its essentials the Monotheism of Isaiah is a reason- 
able belief ; we accept it because it is reasonable, 
not because Isaiah had an intuition that it was true ; 
for we have rejected many things which to Isaiah 
probably seemed no less self-evidently true. And 
yet it would be a profound mistake to assume that 



v.] KEVELATION 139 

the philosophers who now defend Isaiah's creed 
would ever have arrived at it without Isaiah's aid. 

I hope that by this time you will have seen to 
some extent the spirit in which I am approaching 
the special subject of to-day's lecture — the question 
of Revelation. In some of the senses that have 
been given to it, the idea of Revelation is one which 
hardly any one trained in the school — that is to say, 
any school — of modern Philosophy is likely to 
accept. The idea that pieces of information have 
been supernaturally and without any employment 
of their own intellectual faculties communicated at 
various times to particular persons, their truth being 
guaranteed by miracles — in the sense of interruptions 
of the ordinary course of nature by an extraordinary 
fiat of creative power — is one which is already 
rejected by most modern theologians, even among 
those who would generally be called rather conserva- 
tive theologians. I will not now argue the question 
whether any miraculous event, however well attested, 
could possibly be sufficient evidence for the truth 
of spiritual teaching given in attestation of it. I 
will merely remark that to any one who has really 
appreciated the meaning of biblical criticism, it is 
scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles 
could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an 
attestation. In proof of that I will merely appeal 
to the modest, apologetic, tentative tone in which 



140 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would 
usually be classed among the defenders of miracles — 
men like the Bishop of Ely or Professor Sanday of 
Oxford — are content to speak of such evidences. 
They admit the difficulty of proving that such 
miraculous events really happened thousands of 
years ago on the strength of narratives written at 
the very earliest fifty years after the alleged event, 
and they invite us rather to believe in the miracles 
on the evidence of a E-evelation already accepted 
than to accept the revelation on the evidence of the 
miracles. I shall have a word to say on this question 
of miracles next time ; but for the present I want 
to establish, or rather without much argument to 
put before you for your consideration, this position ; 
that the idea of revelation cannot be admitted in 
the sense of a communication of truth by God, claim- 
ing to be accepted not on account of its own intrinsic 
reasonableness or of the intellectual or spiritual 
insight of the person to whom it is made, but on 
account of the historical evidence for miraculous 
occurrences said to have taken place in connexion 
with such communication. The most that can 
reasonably be contended for is that super-normal 
occurrences of this kind may possess a certain 
corroborative value in support of a Revelation 
claiming to be accepted on other grounds. 

What place then is left for the idea of Revelation ? 



v.] REVELATION 141 

I will ask you to go back for a moment to the con- 
clusions of our first lecture. We saw that from the 
idealistic point of view all knowledge may be looked 
upon as a partial communication to the human 
soul of the thoughts or experiences of the divine 
Mind. There is a sense then in which all truth is 
revealed truth. In a more important sense, and a 
sense more nearly allied to that of ordinary usage, 
all moral and spiritual truth may be regarded as 
revealed truth. And in particular those immediate 
judgements about good and evil in which we have 
found the sole means of knowing the divine character 
and purposes must be looked on as divinely im- 
planted knowledge — none the less divinely implanted 
because it is, in the ordinary sense of the words, 
quite natural, normal, and consistent with law. 
Nobody but an Atheist ought to talk about the un- 
assisted human intellect : no one who acquiesces 
in the old doctrine that Conscience is the voice of 
God ought either on the one hand to deny the 
existence of Revelation, or on the other to speak of 
Revelation as if it were confined to the Bible. 

But because we ascribe some intrinsic power of 
judging about spiritual and moral matters to the 
ordinary human intellect, it would be a grievous 
mistake to assume that all men have an equal 
measure of this power. Because we assert that all 
moral and spiritual truth comes to men by Revela- 



142 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

tion, it does not follow that there are not degrees 
of Revelation. And it is one of the special char- 
acteristics of religious and moral truth that it is 
in a peculiar degree dependent upon the superior 
insight of those exceptional men to whom have been 
accorded extraordinary degrees of moral and spiritual 
insight. Even in Science, as we have seen, Ave 
cannot dispense with genius : very ordinary men can 
satisfy themselves of the truth of a hypothesis when 
it is once suggested, though they would have been 
quite incompetent to discover that hypothesis for 
themselves. Still more unquestionably are there 
moral and spiritual truths which, when once dis- 
covered, can be seen to be true by men of very 
commonplace intellect and commonplace character. 
The truths are seen and passed on to others, who 
accept them partly on authority, by way of social 
inheritance and tradition; partly because they are 
confirmed in various degrees by their own indepen- 
dent judgement and experience. Here then — in the 
discovery of new spiritual truth — we encounter that 
higher and exceptional degree of spiritual and ethical 
insight which in a special and pre-eminent sense we 
ought to regard as Revelation or Inspiration. Here 
there is room, in the evolution of Religion and 
Morality, for the influence of the men of moral or 
religious genius — the Prophets, the Apostles, the 
Founders and Reformers of Religions : and, since 



v.] REVELATION 143 

moral and spiritual insight are very closely connected 
with character, for the moral hero, the leader of men, 
the Saint, Especially to the new departures, the 
turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in 
ethical and religious progress connected with the 
appearance of such men, we may apply the term 
Revelation in a supreme or culminating sense. 

It is, as it seems to me, extremely important that 
we should not altogether divorce the idea of Revela- 
tion from those kinds of moral and religious truth 
which are arrived at by the ordinary working of the 
human intellect. The ultimate moral judgements 
no doubt must be intuitive or immediate, but in our 
deductions from them — in their application both 
to practical life and to theories about God and the 
Universe — there is room for much intellectual work 
of the kind which we commonly associate rather 
with the philosopher than with the prophet. But 
the philosopher may be also a prophet. The philo- 
sophically trained Greek Fathers were surely right 
in recognizing that men like Socrates and Plato 
were to be numbered among those to whom the 
Spirit of God had spoken in an exceptional degree. 
They too spoke in the power of the indwelling Logos. 
But still it is quite natural that we should associate 
the idea of Revelation or Inspiration more par- 
ticularly with that kind of moral and intellectual 
discovery which comes to exceptional men by way 



144 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

of apparent intuition or immediate insight. We 
associate the idea of inspiration rather with the poet 
than with the man of Science, and with the prophet 
rather than with the systematic philosopher. It 
is quite natural, therefore, that we should associate 
the idea of Revelation more especially with religious 
teachers of the intuitive order like the Jewish 
prophets than with even those philosophers who 
have also been great practical teachers of Ethics 
and Religion. But it is most important to recognize 
that there is no hard and fast line to be drawn 
between the two classes. The Jewish prophets did 
not arrive at their ideas about God without a great 
deal of hard thinking, though the thinking is for 
the most part unexplicit and the mode of expression 
poetic. ' Their idols are silver and gold ; even the 
work of men's hands. . . . They have hands and 
handle not ; feet have they and walk not : neither 
speak they through their throat.' There is real hard 
reasoning underlying such noble rhetoric, though the 
Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his argu- 
ment against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form 
of a dialectical argument like Plato or St. Thomas 
Aquinas. In the highest instance of all — the case 
of our Lord Jesus Christ himself — a natural instinct 
of reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how 
he came by the truth that he communicated to men ; 
but, though I would not deny that the deepest 



v.] REVELATION 145 

truth came to him chiefly by a supreme gift of 
intuition, there are obvious indications of profound 
intellectual thought in his teaching. Recall for a 
moment his arguments against the misuse of the 
Sabbath, against the superstition of unclean meats, 
against the Sadducean objection to the Resurrection. 
I want to avoid at present dogmatic phraseology; 
so I will only submit in passing that this is only 
what we should expect if the early Church was 
right in thinking of Christ as the supreme expression 
in the moral and religious sphere of the Logos or 
Reason of God. 

The thought of great religious thinkers is none the 
less Revelation because it involves the use of their 
reasoning faculties. But I guarded myself against 
being supposed, in contending for the possibility of 
a philosophical or metaphysical knowledge of God, 
to assume that religious truth had always come to 
men in this way, or even that the greatest steps in 
religious progress have usually taken the form of 
explicit reasoning. Once again, it is all-important to 
distinguish between the way in which a belief comes 
to be entertained and the reasons for its being true. 
All sorts of psychological causes have contributed 
to generate religious beliefs. And when once we 
have discovered grounds in our own reflection or 
experience for believing them to be true, there is 
no reason why we should not regard all of them as 

K 



146 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

pieces of divine revelation. Visions and dreams, 
for instance, had a share in the development of 
religious ideas. We might even admit the possi- 
bility that the human race would never have been 
led to think of the immortality of the soul but 
for primitive ideas about ghosts suggested by the 
phenomena of dreams. The truth of the doctrine 
is neither proved nor disproved by such an account 
of its origin ; but, if that belief is true and dreams 
have played a part in the process by which man has 
been led to it, no Theist surely can refuse to recog- 
nize the divine guidance therein. And so, at a 
higher level, we are told by the author of the Acts 
that St. Peter was led to accept the great principle 
of Gentile Christianity by the vision of a sheet let 
down from heaven. There is no reason why that 
account should not be historically true. The psycho- 
logist may very easily account for St. Peter's vision 
by the working in his mind of the liberal teaching of 
Stephen, the effect of his fast, and so on. But that 
does not prevent us recognizing that vision as an 
instrument of divine Revelation. We at the present 
day do not believe in this fundamental principle of 
Christianity because of that dream of St. Peter's ; 
for we know that dreams are not always truth or 
always edifying. We believe in that principle on 
other grounds — the convincing grounds (among 
others) which St. Luke puts into St. Peter's mouth 



v.] EEVELATION 147 

on the following morning. But that need not pre- 
vent our recognizing that God may have communi- 
cated that truth to the men of that generation — and 
through them to us — partly by means of that dream. 
The two principles then for which I wish to 
contend are these : (1) that Revelation is a matter of 
degree ; (2) that no Revelation can be accepted in 
the long run merely because it came to a particular 
person in a peculiarly intuitive or immediate way. 
It may be that M. Auguste Sabatier is right in seeing 
the most immediate contact of God with the human 
soul in those intuitive convictions which can least 
easily be accounted for by ordinary psychological 
causes ; in those new departures of religious insight, 
those unaccountable comings of new thoughts into 
the mind, which constitute the great crises or turning- 
points of religious history. But, though the coming 
of such thoughts may often be accepted by the 
individual as direct evidences of a divine origin, the 
Metaphysician, on looking back upon them, cannot 
treat the fact that the psychologist cannot account 
for them, as a convincing proof of such an origin, 
apart from our Judgement upon the contents of what 
claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and 
wicked thoughts sometimes arise equally unaccount- 
ably : the fact that they do so is even now 
accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct 
diabolic suggestion. When we have judged the 



148 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

thouglit to be true or the suggestion to be good, 
then we, who on other grounds beHeve in God, may 
see in it a piece of divine revelation, but not till then. 
From this point of view it is clear that we are able 
to recognize various degrees and various kinds of 
divine revelation in many different Religions, philo- 
sophies, systems of ethical teaching. We are able 
to recognize the importance to the world of the 
great historical Religions, in all of which we can 
acknowledge a measure of Revelation, The fact 
that the truths which they teach (in so far as they 
are true) can now be recognized as true by philo- 
sophic thought, does not show that the world 
would ever have evolved those thoughts, apart from 
the influence of the great revealing personalities. 
Philosophy itself — the Philosophy of the professed 
philosophers — has no doubt contributed a very 
important element to the content of the historical 
Religions; but it is only in proportion as they 
become part of a system of religious teaching, and 
the possession of an organized religious community, 
that the ideas of the philosophers really come home 
to multitudes of men, and shape the history of the 
world. Nor in many cases would the philosophers 
themselves have seen what they have seen but for 
the great epoch-making thoughts of the great religion- 
making periods. And the same considerations which 
show the importance of religious movements in the 



v.] REVELATION 149 

past tend also to emphasize the importance of the 
historical Religion and of the religious community 
in which it is enshrined in modern times. Because 
religious truth can now be defended by the use of 
our ordinary intellectual faculties, and because all 
possess these faculties in some degree, it is absurd 
to suppose that the ordinary individual, if left to 
himself, would be likely to evolve a true religious 
system for himself — any more than he would be 
likely to discern for himself the truths that were 
first seen by Euclid or Newton if he were not taught 
them. To under-estimate the importance of the 
great historical Religions and their creators has 
been the besetting sin of technical religious Philo- 
sophy. Metaphysicians have in truth often written 
about Religion in great ignorance as to the real facts 
of religious history. 

But because we recognize a measure of truth in all 
the historical Religions, it does not follow that we 
can recognize an equal amount of truth in all of them. 
The idea that all the Religions teach much the same 
thing — or that, while they vary about that un- 
important part of Religion which is called doctrine 
or dogma, they are all agreed about Morality — is an 
idea which could only occur to the self-complaisant 
ignorance which of late years has done most of the 
theological writing in the correspondence columns of 
our newspapers. The real student of comparative 



150 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

Religion knows that it is only at a rather ad- 
vanced stage in the development of Religion that 
Religion becomes in any important degree an ethical 
teacher at all. Even the highest and most ethical 
Religions are not agreed either in their Ethics or in 
their Theology. Not only can we recognize higher 
and lower Religions ; but the highest Religions, 
among many things which they have in common, 
are at certain points diametrically antagonistic to 
each other. It is impossible therefore reasonably 
to maintain that fashionable attitude of mind 
towards these Religions which my friend Professor 
Inge once described as a sort of honorary member- 
ship of all Religions except one's own. If we are 
to regard the historical Religions as being of any 
importance to our own personal religious life, we 
must choose between them. If we put aside the 
case of Judaism ia its most cultivated modern form, 
a form in which it has been largely influenced by 
Christianity, I suppose there is practically only one 
Religion which would be in the least likely to appeal 
to a modern philosophical student of Religion as 
a possible alternative to Christianity — and that is 
Buddhism. But Buddhist Ethics are not the same 
as Christian Ethics. Buddhist Ethics are ascetic : 
the Christianity which Christ taught was anti- 
ascetic. In its view of the future. Buddhism is 
pessimistic ; Christianity is optimistic. Much as 



v.] REVELATION 151 

Buddhism has done to inculcate Humanity and 
Charity, the principle of Buddhist Humanity is 
not the same as that of Christianity. Humanity is 
encouraged by the Buddhist (in so far as he is really 
influenced by his own formal creed) not from a 
motive of disinterested affection, but as a means of 
escaping from the evils of personal and individual 
existence, and so winning Nirvana. We cannot at one 
and the same time adhere to the Ethics of Buddhism 
and to those of Christianity, though I am far from 
saying that Christians have nothing to learn either 
from Buddhist teaching or from Buddhist practice. 
Still less can we at one and the same time be Atheists 
with the Buddhist and Theists with the Christian ; 
look forward with the Buddhist to the extinction of 
personal consciousness and with the Christian to a 
fuller and more satisfying life. To take an interest 
in comparative Religion is not to be religious ; to 
be religious implies a certain exclusive attachment 
to some defmite form of religious belief, though it 
may of course often be a belief to which many 
historical influences have contributed. 

I have been trying to lead you to a view of 
Revelation which recognizes the existence and the 
importance of those exceptional religious minds to 
whom is due the foundation and development of 
the great historical Religions, while at the same time 
we refuse, in the last resort, to recognize any revela- 



152 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

tion as true except on the ground that its truth can 
be mdependently verified. I do not mean to deny 
that the individual must at first, and may quite 
reasonably in some cases throughout life, accept 
much of his religious belief on authority ; but that 
is only because he may be justified in thinking that 
such and such a person, or more probably such and 
such a religious community, is more likely to be 
right than himself. Rational submission to authority 
in this or that individual postulates independent 
judgement on the part of others. I am far 
from saying that every individual is bound to 
satisfy himself by personal enquiry as to the truth 
of every element in his own Religion ; but, if and 
so far as he determines to do so, he cannot reasonably 
accept an alleged revelation on any other ground 
than that it comes home to him, that the content 
of that Religion appeals to him as true, as satisfying 
the demands of his intellect and of his conscience. 
The question in which most of us, I imagine, are 
most vitally interested is whether the Christian 
Religion is a Religion which we can accept on these 
grounds. That it possesses some truth, that what- 
ever in it is true comes from God — that much is 
likely to be admitted by all who believe in any 
kind of Religion in the sense in which we have been 
discussing Religion. The great question for us is, 
' Can we find any reason for the modern man identi- 



v.] REVELATION 153 

fying himself in any exclusive way with the historical 
Christian Religion? Granted that there is some 
truth in all Religions, does Christianity contain the 
most truth ? Is it in any sense the one absolute, 
final, universal Religion ? ' 

That will be the subject for our consideration in 
the next lecture. But meanwhile I want to suggest 
to you one very broad provisional answer to our 
problem. Christianity alone of the historical Re- 
ligions teaches those great truths to which we have 
been conducted by a mere appeal to Reason and to 
Conscience. It teaches ethical Monotheism ; that is 
to say, it thinks of God as a thinking, feeling, willing 
Consciousness, and understands His nature in the 
light of the highest moral ideal. It teaches the belief 
in personal Immortality, and it teaches a Morality 
which in its broad general principles still appeals to 
the Conscience of Humanity. Universal Love it sets 
forth as at once the central point in its moral ideal 
and the most important element in its conception 
of God. In one of those metaphors which express 
so much more than any more exact philosophical 
formula, it is the Religion which teaches the Father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man. And 
these truths were taught by the historical Jesus. 
No one up to his time had ever taught them with 
equal clearness and in equal purity, and with the 
same freedom from other and inconsistent teachings ; 



154 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

and this teaching was developed by his first followers. 
Amid all aberrations and amid all contamination by 
heterogeneous elements, the society or societies which 
look back to Christ as their Founder have never in 
the worst times ceased altogether to teach these 
truths ; and now they more and more tend to 
constitute the essence of Christianity as it is to-day 
— all the more so on account of the Church's gradual 
shuffling off of so many adventitious ideas and prac- 
tices which were at one time associated with them. 
Christianity is and remains the only one of the 
great historical Religions which has taught and 
does teach these great truths in all their fullness.^ 
These considerations would by themselves be suffi- 
cient to put Christianity in an absolutely unique 
position among the Religions of Mankind. 

I have so far been regarding our Lord Jesus 
Christ simply as a teacher of religious and ethical 
truth. I think it is of fundamental importance 
that we should begin by regarding him in this light. 

1 If it be said that Judaism or any other Religion does now teach 
these truths as fully as Christianity, this may possibly apply to the 
creed of individual members of these Eeligions, but it can hardly be 
claimed for the historical Religions themselves. I should certainly be 
prepared to contend that even such individuals lose something by 
not placing in the centre of their Religion the personality of him 
by whom they were first taught, and the communities which have been 
the great transmitters of them. But in this course of lectures I am 
chiefly concerned with giving reasons why Christians should remain 
Christians, rather than with giving reasons why others who are not 
so should become Christians. 



v.] REVELATION 155 

It was in this light that he first presented himself 
to his fellow-countrymen — even before (in all 
probability) he claimed to be the fulfiller of the 
Messianic ideal which had been set before them by 
the prophets of their race. And I could not, without 
a vast array of quotation, give you a sufficient 
impression of the prominence of this aspect of his 
work and personality among the earlier Greek 
Fathers. Even after the elaborate doctrines of 
Catholic Christianity had begun to be developed, 
it was still primarily as the supremely inspired 
Teacher that Jesus was most often thought of. 
When the early Christians thought of him as the 
incarnate Logos or Reason of God, to teach men 
divine truth was still looked upon as the supreme 
function of the Logos and the purpose of his In- 
dwelling in the historical Jesus. But from the 
first Jesus appealed to men as much more than a 
teacher. It is one of the distinctive peculiarities 
of religious and ethical knowledge that it is inti- 
mately connected with character : religious and 
moral teaching of the highest kind is in a peculiar 
degree inseparable from the personality of the 
teacher. Jesus impressed his contemporaries, and 
he has impressed successive ages as having not only 
set before man the highest religious and moral 
ideal, but as having in a unique manner realized 
that ideal in his own life. Even the word ' example ' 



156 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

does not fully express the impression which he made 
on his followers, or do justice to the inseparability 
of his personality from his teaching. In the religious 
consciousness of Christ men saw realized the ideal 
relation of man not merely to his fellow-man but also 
to his heavenly Father. From the first an enthusi- 
astic reverence for its Founder has been an essential 
part of the Christian Religion amid all the variety 
of the phases which it has assumed. The doctrine 
of the Christian Church was in its origin an attempt 
to express in the philosophical language of the time 
its sense of this supreme value of Christ for the 
religious and moral life of man. As to the historical 
success and the present usefulness of these attempts, 
I shall have a word to say next time. Meanwhile, 
I would leave with you this one thought. The 
claim of Christianity to be the supreme, the universal, 
in a sense the fimal Religion, must rest mainly, in 
the last resort, upon the appeal which Christ and 
his Religion make to the moral and religious con- 
sciousness of the present. 

LITERATUEE 

See tlie works mentioned at the end of the next Lecture, 
to which, as dealing more specially with the subject of 
Lecture v., may be added Professor Sanday's Inspiration, 
and Professor Wendt's Revelation and Christianity. 



vi.J CHRISTIANITY 157 



LECTURE VI 

CHRISTIANITY 

In my last lecture I tried to effect a transition from 
the idea of religious truth as something believed by 
the individual, and accepted by him on the evidence 
of his own Reason and Conscience to the idea of a 
Religion considered as a body of religious truth 
handed down by tradition in an organized society. 
The higher Religions — those which have passed 
beyond the stage of merely tribal or national Religion 
— are based upon the idea that religious truth of 
enduring value has been from time to time revealed 
to particular persons, the Founders or Apostles or 
Reformers of such religions. We recognized the 
validity of this idea of Revelation, and the supreme 
importance to the moral and religious life of such 
historical revelations, on one condition — that the 
claim of any historical Religion to the allegiance of 
its followers must be held to rest in the last resort 
upon the appeal which it makes to their Reason and 
Conscience : though the individual may often be 



158 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

quite justified in accepting and relying upon the 
Reason and Conscience of the rehgious Society rather 
than upon his own. 

The view which I have taken of Revelation makes 
it quite independent of what are commonly called 
miracles. All that I have said is quite consistent 
with the unqualified acceptance or with the un- 
qualified rejection of miracles. But some of you 
may perhaps expect me to explain a little more fully 
my own attitude towards that question. And there- 
fore I will say this much — that, if we regard a 
miracle as implying a suspension of a law of nature, 
T do not think we can call such a suspension 
a priori incredible ; but the enormous experience 
which we have of the actual regularity of the laws 
of nature, and of the causes which in certain states 
of the human mind lead to the belief in miracles, 
makes such an event in the highest degree impro- 
bable. To me at least it would seem practically 
impossible to get sufficient evidence for the occurrence 
of such an event in the distant past : all our historical 
reasoning presupposes the reign of law. But it is 
being more and more admitted by theologians who 
are regarded as quite orthodox and rather con- 
servative, that the idea of a miracle need not neces- 
sarily imply such a suspension of natural law. And 
on the other hand, decidedly critical and liberal 
theologians are more and more disposed to admit 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 159 

that many of the abnormal events commonly called 
miraculous may very well have occurred without 
involving any real suspension of natural law. Recent 
advances in psychological knowledge have widened 
our conception of the possible influence of mind over 
matter and of mind over miud. Whether an alleged 
miraculous event is to be accepted or not must, as 
it seems to me, depend partly upon the amount of 
critically sifted historical evidence which can be 
produced for it, partly upon the nature of the event 
itself — upon the question whether it is or is not of 
such a kind that we can with any probability suppose 
that it might be accounted for either by known laws 
or by laws at present imperfectly understood. 

To apply these principles in detail to the New Testa- 
ment narratives would involve critical discussions 
which are outside the purpose of these lectures. I 
will only say that few critical scholars would deny that 
some recorded miracles even in the New Testament 
are unhistorical. When they find an incident like 
the healing of Malchus's ear omitted in the earlier, 
and inserted in the later redaction of a common 
original, they cannot but recognize the probability 
of traditional amplification. At the same time few 
liberal theologians will be disposed to doubt the 
general fact that our Lord did cure some diseases 
by spiritual influence, or that an appearance of our 
Lord to the disciples — of whatever nature — actually 



160 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

did occur, and was the means of assuring them of 
his continued life and power. At all events I do 
not myself doubt these two facts. But at least 
when miracles are not regarded as constituting real 
exceptions to natural law, it is obvious that they 
will not prove the truth of any teaching which may 
have been connected with them ; while, even if we 
treat the Gospel miracles as real exceptions to law, 
the difficulty of proving them in the face of modern 
critical enquiry is so great that the evidence will 
hardly come home to any one not previously con- 
vinced, on purely spiritual grounds, of the ex- 
ceptional character of our Lord's personality and 
mission. This being so, I do not think that our 
answer to the problem of miracles, whatever it be, 
can play any verj} important part in Christian 
Apologetic. When we have become Christians on 
other grounds, the acts of healing may still retain 
a certain value as illustrating the character of the 
Master, and the Resurrection vision as proclaiming 
the truth of Immortality in a way which will 
come home to minds not easily accessible to 
abstract argument. The true foundation not merely 
for belief in the teaching of Christ, but also for 
the • Christian's reverence for his Person, must, as 
it seems to me, be found in the appeal which his 
words and his character still make to the Conscience 
and Reason of mankind. This proposition would be 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 161 

perhaps more generally accepted if I were to say 
that the claim of Christ to allegiance rests upon the 
way in which he satisfies the heart, the aspirations, 
the religious needs of mankind. And I should be 
quite willing to adopt such language, if you will 
only include respect for historic fact and intellectual 
truth among these religious needs, and admit that 
a reasonable faith must rest on something better 
than mere emotion. Fully to exhibit the grounds 
of this claim of Christ upon us would involve an 
examination of the Gospel narratives in detail : it 
would involve an attempt to present to you what was 
this teaching, this character, this religious conscious- 
ness which has commanded the homage of mankind. 
To attempt such a task would be out of place in a 
brief course of lectures devoted to a particular 
aspect of Religion — its relation to Philosophy. 
Here I must assume that you feel the spiritual 
supremacy of Christ — his unique position in the 
religious history of the world and his unique import- 
ance for the spiritual life of each one of us — ; and go 
on to ask what assertions such a conviction warrants 
us in making about his person and nature, what in 
short should be our attitude towards the traditional 
doctrines of the Christian Church. 

You may know something of the position taken 
up in this matter by the dominant school of what 
I may call believing liberal Theology in Germany — ■■ 

L 



162 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

tlie school whicli takes its name from the great 
theologian Ritschl, but which will be best known to 
most Englishmen ia coimexion with the name of Prof. 
Harnack, though it may be well to remember that 
Harnack is nearer to the left than to the right wing 
of that school. The fundamental principle of that 
school is to base the claims of Christianity mainly 
upon the appeal which the picture of the life, teaching, 
character, and personality of Christ makes to the 
moral and religious consciousness of mankind. Their 
teaching is Christo-centric in the highest possible 
degree : but they are almost or entirely indifferent 
to the dogmatic formulae which may be employed to 
express this supreme religious importance of Christ. 
In putting the personal and historical Christ, and 
not any doctrine about him, in the centre of the 
religious life I believe they are right. But this 
principle is sometimes asserted in an exaggerated 
and one-sided manner. In the first place they are 
somewhat contemptuous of Philosophy, and of philo- 
sophic argument even for such fundamental truths 
as the existence of God. I do not see that the 
subjective impression made by Christ can by itself 
prove the fact of God's existence. We must first 
believe that there is a God to be revealed before 
we can be led to believe in Christ as the supreme 
Bevealer. I do not believe that the modem world 
will permanently accept a view of the Universe 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 163 

which does not commend itself to its Reason. The 
Ritschhans talk about the truth of Religion resting 
upon value-judgements. I can quite understand that 
a value- judgement may tell us the supreme value of 
Christ's character and his fitness to be treated as the 
representative of God to us, when once we believe 
in God : but I cannot see how any value- judgement 
taken by itself can assure us of that existence. 
Value is one thing : existence is another. To my 
mind a Christian Apologetic should begin, like the 
old Apologies of Justin or Aristides, with showing 
the essential reasonableness of Christ's teaching 
about God and its essential harmony with the 
highest philosophic teaching about duty, about the 
divine nature, about the soul and its eternal destiny. 
The Ritschlian is too much disposed to underrate 
the value of all previous religious and ethical teach- 
ing, even of Judaism at its highest : he is not content 
with making Christ the supreme Revealer : he wants 
to make him the only Revealer. And when we turn 
to post-Christian religious history, he is apt to treat 
all the great developments of religious and ethical 
thought from the time of the Apostles to our own 
day as simply worthless and even mischievous 
corruptions of the original, and only genuine, Chris- 
tianity. He tends to reduce Christianity to the 
ipsissima verba of its Founder. The Ritschlian 
dislikes Dogma, not because it may be at times a 



164 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

misdevelopment, but because it is a development ; 
not because some of it may be antiquated Philosophy, 
but simply because it is Philosophy.^ 

In order to treat fairly this question of doctrinal 
development, it must be remembered that what is 
commonly called dogma is only a part — ^perhaps 
not the most important part — of that development. 
Supreme as I believe to be the value of Christ's 
great principle of Brotherhood, it is impossible to 
deny that, if we look in detail at the moral ideal 
of any educated Christian at the present day, we 
shall find in it many elements which cannot explicitly 
be discovered in the ipsissima verba of Christ and 
still less of his Apostles. And development in the 
ethical ideal always carries with it some development 
in a man's conception of God and the Universe. 
Some of these elements are due to a gradual bringing 
out into clear consciousness, and an application to 
new details, of principles latent in the actual words 
of Christ ; others to an infusion of Greek Philosophy ; 
others to the practical experience and the scientific 
discoveries of the modern world. Christianity in 
the course of nineteen centuries has gradually 
absorbed into itself many ideas from various sources, 

1 In their assertion of the necessity of Development, and of the 
religious community as the origin of Development, the teaching of 
the Abb6 Loisy and the Roman Catholic Modernists seems to me to 
be complementary to that of the Ritschlians, though I do not always 
fccoept their rather destructive critical conclusions. 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 165 

christianizing them in the process. Many ideas, 
much Hellenic Philosophy, many Hellenic ideals of 
life, many Roman ideas of government and organiza- 
tion have thus, in the excellent phrase of Professor 
Gardner, been ' baptized into Christ.' This capacity 
of absorbing into itself elements of spiritual life 
which were originally independent of it is not a 
defect of historical Christianity, but one of its 
qualifications for being accepted by the modern 
world as a imiversal, an absolute, a final Religion. 

It does not seem to me possible to recognize the 
claim of any historical Religion to be final and 
ultimate, unless it include within itself a principle 
of development. Let me, as briefly as I can, illus- 
trate what I mean. It is most clearly and easily 
seen in the case of Morality. If the idea of a 
universal Religion is to mean that any detailed 
code of Morals laid down at a definite moment of 
history can serve by itself for the guidance of all 
human life in all after ages, we may at once dismiss 
the notion as a dream. In nothing did our Lord 
show his greatness and the fitness of his Religion 
for universality more than in abstaining from 
drawing up such a code. He confined himself 
to laying down a few great principles, with 
illustrations applicable to the circumstances of 
his immediate hearers. Those principles require 
development and application to the needs and 



166 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

circumstances of successive ages before they can 
suffice to guide us in the details of conduct. To 
effect this development and application has been 
historically the work of the Church which owes its 
origin to the disciples whom he gathered around 
him. If we may accept the teaching of the fourth 
Gospel as at least having germs in the actual 
utterances of our Lord, he himself foresaw the 
necessity of such a development. At all events 
the belief in the continued work of God's Spirit 
in human Society is an essential principle of the 
Christian Religion as it was taught by the first 
followers of its Founder. Take for instance the case 
of slavery. Our Lord never condemned slavery : 
it is not certain that he would have done so, 
had the case been presented to him. Very likely 
his answer would have been ' Who made me a judge 
or a divider,' or ' Render unto Csesar the things that 
are Csesar's.' No one on reflection can now fail to 
see the essential incompatibility between slavery 
and the Christian spirit ; yet it was perhaps fourteen 
hundred years before a single Christian thinker 
definitely enunciated that incompatibility, and more 
than eighteen hundred years before slavery was 
actually banished from all nominally Christian 
lands. Who can doubt that many features of our 
existing social system are equally incompatible with 
the principles of Christ's teaching, and that the 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 167 

accepted Christian morality of a hundred years 
hence will definitely condemn many things which 
the average Christian Conscience now allows ? 

And then there is another kind of development 
in Ethics which is equally necessary. The Christian 
law of Love bids us promote the true good of our 
fellow-men, bids us regard another man's good as 
equally valuable with our own or with the like good 
of any other. But what is this good life which we 
are to promote ? As to that our Lord has only 
laid down a few very general principles — the supreme 
value of Love itself, the superiority of the spiritual 
to the carnal, the importance of sexual purity. 
These principles our consciences still acknowledge, 
and there are no others of equal importance. But 
what of the intellectual life ? Has that no value ? 
Our Lord never depreciated it, as so many religious 
founders and reformers have done. But he has 
given us no explicit guidance about it. When the 
Christian ideal embraced within itself a recognition 
of the value and duty of Culture, it was borrowing 
from Greece. And when we turn from Ethics to 
Theology, the actual fact of development is no less 
indisputable. Every alteration of the ethical ideal 
has brought with it some alteration in our idea of 
God. We can no longer endure theories of the 
Atonement which are opposed to modem ideas of 
Justice, though they were quite compatible with 



168 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

patristic or medieval ideas of Justice. The advances 
of Science have altered our whole conception of God's 
mode of acting upon or governing the world. None 
of these things are religiously so important as the 
great principle of the Fatherhood of God, nor have 
they in any way tended to modify its truth or its 
supreme importance. But they do imply that our 
Theology is not and cannot be in all points the same 
as that of the first Christians. 

Now with these presuppositions let us approach 
the question of that great structure of formal dogma 
which the Church has built upon the foundation 
of Christ's teaching. A development undoubtedly 
it is ; but, while we must not assume that every 
development which has historically taken place is 
necessarily true or valuable, it is equally unphilo- 
sophical to assume that, because it is a development, 
it is necessarily false or worthless. Our Lord himself 
did, indeed, claim to be the Messiah ; the fact of 
Messiahship was what was primarily meant by the 
title ' Son of God.' Even in the Synoptists he exhibits 
a consciousness of a direct divine mission supremely 
important for his own race ; and, before the close, we 
can perhaps discover a growing conviction that the 
truth which he was teaching was meant for a larger 
world. Starting from and developing these ideas, his 
followers set themselves to devise terms which should 
express their own sense of their Master's unique 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 169 

religious value and importance, to express what 
they felt he had been to their own souls, what 
they felt he might be to all who accepted his 
message. Even to St. Paul the term ' Son of God ' 
still meant primarily ' the Messiah ' : but in the 
light of his conception of Jesus, the Messianic idea 
expanded till the Christ was exalted to a position 
far above anything which Jewish prophecy or 
Apocalypse had ever claimed for him. And the 
means of expressing these new ideas were found 
naturally and inevitably in the current philosophical 
terminology of the day. With the fourth Gospel, 
if not already with St. Paul, there was infused into 
the teaching of the Church a new element. From 
the Jewish-Alexandrian speculative Theology the 
author borrowed the term Logos to express what he 
conceived to be the cosmic importance of Christ's 
position. He accepted from that speculation — ^pro- 
bably from Philo — the theory which personified or 
half-personified that Logos or Wisdom of God 
through which God was represented in the Old 
Testament as creating the world and inspiring the 
prophets. This Logos through whom God had 
throughout the ages been more and more fully 
revealing Himself had at last become actually 
incarnate in Jesus Christ. This Word of God is 
also described as truly God, though in the fourth 
Gospel the relation of the Father to the Word— at 



170 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect, 

least to the Word before the Incarnation — is left 
wholly vague and undefined. 

From these comparatively simple beginnings 
sprang centuries of controversy culminating in that 
elaborate system of dogma which is often little 
understood even by its most vigorous champions. 
You know in a very general way the result. The 
Logos was made more and more distinct from God, 
endowed with a more and more decidedly personal 
existence. Then, when the interests of Monotheism 
seemed to be endangered, the attempt was made to 
save it by asserting the subordination of the Son to 
the Father. The result was that by Arianism the 
Son was reduced to the position of an inferior God. 
Polytheism had once more to be averted by assert- 
ing in even stronger terms not merely the equality 
of the Son with the Father but also the Unity of the 
God who is both Father and Son. The doctrine of 
the Divinity of the Holy Ghost went through a some- 
what similar series of stages. At first regarded as 
identical with the Word, a distinction was gradually 
effected. The Word was said to have been incarnate 
in Jesus ; while it was through the Holy Ghost that 
the subsequent work of God was carried on in human 
hearts. And by similar stages the equality of the 
Holy Ghost to Father and to Son was gradual y 
evolved; while it was more and more strongly 
asserted that, in spite of the eternal distinction of 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 171 

Persons, it was one and the same God who revealed 
Himself in all the activities attributed to each of 
them. 

Side by side with these controversies about the 
relation between the Father and the Word, there 
was a gradual development of doctrine as to the 
relation between the Logos and the human Jesus 
in whom he took up his abode. Frequently the idea 
of any real humanity in Jesus was all but lost. That 
was at last saved by the Catholic formula ' per- 
fect God and perfect man ' ; though it cannot be 
denied that popular thought in all ages has never 
quite discarded the tendency to think of Jesus as 
simply God in human form, and not really man at 
all. Even now there are probably hundreds of people 
who regard themselves as particularly orthodox 
Churchmen who yet do not know that the Church 
teaches that our Lord had a human soul and a 
human will. 

What are we to make of all that vast structure, 
of the elaboration and complication of which the 
Constantinopolitan Creed which we miscall Nicene 
and even the so-called Athanasian Creed give very 
little idea to those who do not also know something 
of the Councils, the Fathers, and the Schoolmen ? 
Has it all a modern meaning ? Can it be translated 
into terms of our modem thought and speech ? For 
I suppose it hardly needs demonstration — that such 



172 PHILOSOPHY AND ELLIGION [lect. 

translation is necessary, if it be possible. I doubt 
whether any man in this audience who has not made 
a special study of the subject, will get up and say 
that the meaning of such terms as ' substance,' 
' essence,' ' nature,' ' hypostasis,' ' person,' ' eternal 
generation,' ' procession,' ' hypostatic union,' and 
the like is at once evident to him by the light of 
nature and an ordinary modern education. And 
those who know most about the matter will most 
fully realize the difficulty of saying exactly what was 
meant by such phrases at this or that particular 
moment or by this or that particular thinker. A 
thorough discussion of this subject from the point 
of view of one who acknowledges the supreme claims 
of Christ upon the modem mind, and is yet willing 
fairly to examine the traditional Creed in the light 
of modem philosophical culture, is a task which 
very much needs to be undertaken. I doubt if it 
has been satisfactorily performed yet. Even if I 
possessed a tithe of the learning necessary for that 
task, I could obviously not undertake it now. But 
a few remarks on the subject may be of use for the 
guidance of our personal religious life in this matter : 
(1) I should like once more to emphasize the fact 
that the really important thing, from the point of 
view of the spiritual life of the individual soul, is 
our personal attitude towards our Lord himself and 
his teaching, and not the phrases in which we express 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 173 

it. A man who believes what Christ taught about 
God's Fatherhood, about human brotherhood and 
human duty, about sin, the need for repentance, 
the Father's readiness to forgive, the value of Prayer, 
the certainty of Immortality — the man who finds 
the ideal of his life in the character of Jesus, and 
strives by the help which he has supplied to think 
of God and feel towards God as he did, to imitate 
him in his life, to live (like him) in communion with 
the Father and in the hope of Immortality — he is a 
Christian, and a Christian in the fullest sense of the 
word. He will find in that faith all that is necessary 
(to use the old phrase) for salvation — for personal 
goodness and personal Religion, And such a man 
will be saved, and saved through Christ ; even though 
he has never heard of the Creeds, or deliberately 
rejects many of the formulae which the Church or 
the Churches have 'built upon' that one founda- 
tion. 

(2) At the same time, if we believe in the supreme 
importance of Christ for the world, for the religious 
life of the Church and of the mdividual, it is surely 
convenient to have some language in which to express 
our sense of that importance. The actual personal 
attitude towards Christ is the essential thing : but 
as a means towards that attitude it is of importance 
to express what Christ has actually been to others, 
and what he ought to be to ourselves. Children 



174 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

and adults alike require to have the claims of Christ 
presented to them before they can verify them by 
their own experience : and this requires articulate 
language of some kind. Religion can only be 
handed down, diffused, propagated by an organized 
society : and a religious society must have some 
means of handing on its religious ideas. It is possible 
to hold that under other conditions a different set 
of terms might have expressed the truth as well as 
those which have actually been enshrined in the 
New Testament, the Liturgies, and the Creeds. But 
the phrases which have been actually adopted surely 
have a strong presumption in their favour, even if 
it were merely through the difficulty of changing 
them, and the importance of unity, continuity, 
corporate life. It is easier to explain, or even if 
need be, alter in some measure the meaning of an 
accepted formula than to introduce a new one. 
Religious development has at all times taken place 
largely in this way. Our Lord himself entirely 
transformed the meaning of God's Fatherhood, 
Messiahship, the Kingdom of God, the people of 
God, the true Israel. At all events we should 
endeavour to discover the maximum of truth that 
any traditional formula can be made to yield before 
we discard it in favour of a new one. If we want 
to worship and to work with Christ's Church, we 
must do our best to give the maximum of meaning 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 175 

to the language in which it expresses its faith and 
its devotion. 

(3) We must insist strongly upon the thoroughly 
human character of Christ's own consciousness. 
Jesus did not — so I believe the critical study of the 
Gospels leads us to think — himself claim to be God, 
or to be Son of God in any sense but that of 
Messiahship. He claimed to speak with authority : 
he claimed a divine mission : he claimed to be a Re- 
vealer of divine truth. The fourth Gospel has been 
of infinite service to spiritual Christianity. It has 
given the world a due sense of the spiritual import- 
ance of Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 
Perhaps Christianity could hardly have expanded 
into a universal Religion without that Gospel. But 
we cannot regard all that the Johannine Christ says 
about himself as the ipsissima verba of Jesus. The 
picture is idealized in accordance with the writer's 
own conceptions, though after all its Tlieology is 
very much simpler than the later Theology which 
has grown out of it permits most people to see. We 
must not let these discourses blind us to the human 
character of Christ's consciousness. And this real 
humanity must carry with it the recognition of the 
thoroughly human Umitations of his knowledge. 
The Bishop of Birmingham has prepared the way 
for the union of a really historical view of Christ's 
life with a reasonable interpretation of the Catholic 



176 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

doctrine about him, by reviving the ancient view as 
to the limitation of his intellectual knowledge ; ^ but 
the principle must be carried in some ways further 
than the Bishop himself would be prepared to go. 
The accepted Christology must be distinctly recog- 
nized as the Church's reflection and comment upon 
Christ's work and its value, not as the actual teaching 
of the Master about himself. 

(4) It must likewise be recognized that the language 
in which the Church expressed this attitude towards 
Christ was borrowed from Greek Metaphysics, par- 
ticularly from Plato and Neo-Platonism in the 
patristic period, and from Aristotle in the Middle 
Ages. And we cannot completely separate language 
from thought. It was not merely Greek technical 
phrases but Greek ways of thinking which were 
imported into Catholic Christianity. And the lan- 
guage, the categories, the ideas of Greek Philosophy 
were to some extent different from those of modem 
times. The most Platonically-minded thinker of 
modem times does not really think exactly as Plato 
thought : the most CathoUc-minded thinker of 
modem times, if he has also breathed the atmosphere 
of modem Science and modem Culture, cannot really 
think exactly as Athanasius or BasU thought. I 

1 In his Essay in Lux Mundi (1889). He has since developed his 
view in his Bampton Lectures on The Incarnation of the Son of 
God and a volume of Dissertations on Subjects connected mth the 
Incarnation. 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 177 

do not suppose that any modem mind can think 
itself back into exactly the state of mind which an 
ancient Father was in, when he used the term Logos. 
This central idea of the Logos is not a category 
of modem thought. We cannot really think of a 
Being who is as distinct from the Father as he is 
represented as being in some of the patristic utter- 
ances — I say advisedly some, for widely different 
modes of thought are found in Fathers of equal 
authority — and yet so far one with him that we can 
say 'One God, one spiritual Being, and not two.' 
Nor are we under any obligation to accept these 
formulae as representing profound mysteries which 
we cannot understand : they were simply pieces of 
metaphysical thinking, some of them valuable and 
successful pieces of thinking, others less so. We 
must use them as helps, not as fetters to our thought. 
But, though we cannot think ourselves back into 
exactly the same intellectual condition as a fourth- or 
fifth-century Father, there is no reason why we should 
not recognize the fundamental truth of the religious 
idea which he was trying to express. A modem Philo- 
sopher would probably express that thought some- 
what in this manner. ' The whole world is a revela- 
tion of God in a sense, and still more so is the human 
mind : all through the ages God has gone on reveal- 
ing Himself more and more in human consciousness, 
especially through the prophets and other exception- 

M 



178 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

ally inspired men. The fullest and completest revela- 
tion of Himself was made once for all in the person 
and teaching of Jesus, in whom we recognize a revela- 
tion of God adequate to all our spiritual needs, when 
developed and interpreted by the continued presence 
of God's Spirit in the world and particularly in the 
Church which grew out of the little company of 
Jesus' friends.' 

(5) I do not think at the present day even quite 
orthodox people are much concerned about the 
technicalities of the conciliar Theology, or even about 
the niceties of the Athanasian Creed. They are 
even a little suspicious sometimes that much talk 
about the doctrine of the Logos is only intended to 
evade a plain answer to the supreme question of the 
Divinity of Christ. You will expect me perhaps 
to say something about that question. I would 
first observe that the popular term ' divinity of 
Christ ' is apt to give a somewhat misleading im- 
pression of what the orthodox teaching on the subject 
really is. For one thing, it is apt to suggest the idea 
of a pre-existent human consciousness of Jesus, 
which would be contrary to CathoUc teaching. The 
Logos — the eternal Son or Reason of God — pre- 
existed ; but not the man Jesus Christ who was bom 
at a particular moment of history, and who is still, 
according to Catholic Theology, a distinct human 
soul perfectly and for ever united with the Word. 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 179 

And then again, it is apt to suggest the heretical 
idea that the whole Trinity was incarnate in Christ, 
and not merely the Word. Orthodox Theology does 
not teach that God the Father became incarnate 
in Christ, and suffered upon the Cross. And lastly, 
the constant iteration of the phrase ' Divinity 
of Christ ' tends to the concealment of the other half 
of the Catholic doctrine — the real humanity of Christ. 
To speak of the God-manhood of Christ or the in- 
dwelling of God in Christ would be a truer representa- 
tion even of the strictest orthodox doctrine, apart 
from all modern re-interpretations. But even so, 
when all this is borne in mind, it may be asked, What 
is the real meaning of saying that a man was also 
God ? I would answer, ' Whether it is possible to 
give a modem, intelligible, philosophically defensible 
meaning to the idea of Christ's Divinity depends 
entirely upon the question what we conceive to be 
the true relation between Humanity in general and 
God.' If (as I have attempted to show) we are 
justified in thinking of all human consciousness as 
constituting a partial reproduction of the divine Mind; 
if we are justified in thinking of human Reason, and 
particularly of the human Conscience, as constituting 
in some measure and in some sense a revelation by 
means of which we can rise to a contemplation of the 
divine nature ; if Personality (as we know it in man) 
is the highest category within our knowledge ; then 



180 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

there is a real meaning in talking of one particular 
man being also divine ; of the divine Reason or Logos 
as dwelling after a unique, exceptional, pre-eminent 
manner in him. 

As Dr. Edward Caird has remarked, all the meta- 
physical questions which were formerly discussed 
as to the relation between the divine and the human 
nature in Christ, are now being discussed again in 
reference to the relation of Humanity in general to 
God. We cannot say intelligibly that God dwells 
in Christ, unless we have already recognized that in 
a sense God dwells and reveals Himself in Humanity 
at large, and in each particular human soul. But 
I fully recognize that, if this is all that is meant by 
the expression ' divinity of Christ,' that doctrine 
would be evacuated of nearly all that makes it 
precious to the hearts of Christian people. And 
therefore it is all-important that we should go on to 
insist that men do not reveal God equally. The 
more developed intellect reveals God more com- 
pletely than that of the child or the savage : and 
(far more important from a religious point of view), 
the higher and more developed moral consciousness 
reveals Him more than the lower, and above all the 
actually better man reveals God more than the 
worse man. Now, if in the life, teaching, and 
character of Christ — in his moral and religious 
consciousness, and in the life and character which 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 181 

so completely expressed and illustrated that con- 
sciousness — we can discover the highest revelation 
of the divine nature, we can surely attach a real 
meaning to the language of the Creeds which 
singles him out from all the men that ever lived 
as the one in whom the ideal relation of man to 
God is most completely realized. If God can only 
be known as revealed in Humanity, and Christ 
is the highest representative of Humanity, we can 
very significantly say 'Christ is the Son of God, 
very God of very God, of one substance with the 
Father,' though the phrase undoubtedly belongs 
to a philosophical dialect which we do not habit- 
ually use. 

(6) Behind the doctrine of the Incarnation looms 
the still more technical doctrine of the Trinity. Yet 
after all, it is chiefly, I believe, as a sort of necessary 
background or presupposition to the idea of Christ's 
divine nature that modem religious people, not 
professionally interested in Theology, attach im- 
portance to that doctrine. They accept the doctrine 
in so far as it is implied by the teaching of Scripture 
and by the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, but they 
are not much attached to the technicalities of the 
Athanasian Creed. The great objection to that 
Creed, apart from the damnatory clauses, is the 
certainty that it will be misunderstood by most of 
those who think they understand it at all. The 



182 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

best thing we could do with the Athanasian Creed is 
to drop it altogether : the next best thing to it is 
to explain it, or at least so much of it as really 
interests the ordinary layman — the doctrine of three 
Persons in one God. And therefore it is important 
to insist in the strongest possible way that the 
word ' Person ' which has most unfortunately come 
to be the technical term for what the Greeks more 
obscurely called the three vTroa-rdaeis in the Godhead 
does not, and never did, mean what we commonly 
understand by Personality — whether in the language 
of ordinary life or of modem Philosophy. I do not 
deny that at certain periods Theology did tend to 
think of the Logos as a distinct being from the 
Father, a distinct consciousness with thoughts, will, 
desires, emotions not identical with those of God 
the Father. The distinction was at times pushed 
to a point which meant either sheer Tritheism, or 
something which is incapable of being distinctly 
realized in thought at all. But that is scarcely true 
of the Theology which was finally accepted either 
by East or West. This is most distinctly seen in 
the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas : and I 
would remind you that you cannot be more orthodox 
than St. Thomas — the source not only of the Theology 
professed by the Pope and taught in every Roman 
Seminary but of the Theology embodied in our own 
Articles. St. Thomas' explanation of the Trinity 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 183 

is that God is at one and the same time Power or 
Causei (Father), Wisdom (Son),Will (Holy Ghost); or, 
since the Will of God is always a loving Will, Love 
(Amor) is sometimes substituted for Will (Voluntas) 
in explanation of the Holy Spirit.^ How little St. 

1 I venture thus to translate ' Principium ' {dpxv) ; in Abelard and 
his disciple Peter the Lombard, the famous Master of the Sentences, 
the word is ' Potentia ' (L. i. Dist. xxxiv. ) : and St. Thomas himself 
(P. I. Q. xli. Art. 4) explains ' Principium ' by ' Potentia geuerandi 
Filium." 

2 Thus in Summa Theologica, Pars i. Q. xxxvii. Art. 1, the 
' conclusio ' is ' Amor, personaliter acceptus, proprium nomen est 
Spiritus sancti,' which is explained to mean that there are in the God- 
head ' duae processiones : una per modum intellectus, quae est processio 
Verbi ; alia per modum voluntatis, quas est processio amoris.' So 
again {Hid. Q. xlv. Art. 7) : 'In creaturis igitur rationalibus, in 
quibus est intellectus et voluntas, invenitur repraesentatio Trinitatis 
per modum imaginis, inquantum invenitur in eis Verbum con- 
ceptnm, et amor procedens.' In a friendly review of my Essay in 
Contentio Veritatis, in which I endeavoured to expound in a modern 
form this doctrine, Dr. Sanday (Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 
iv., 1903) wrote : * One of the passages that seem to me most open to 
criticism is that on the doctrine of the Trinity (p. 48). "Power, 
Wisdom, and Will " surely cannot be a sound trichotomy as applied 
either to human nature or Divine. Surely Power is an expression of 
Will and not co-ordinate with it. The common division. Power (or 
Will), Wisdom, and Love is more to the point. Yet Dr. Rashdall 
identifies the two triads by what I must needs think a looseness of 
reasoning.' The Margaret Professor of Divinity hardly seems to 
recognize that he is criticizing the Angelical Doctor and not myself. If 
Dr. Sanday had had the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, 
the result, if less metaphysically subtle, might no doubt have proved 
more easily intelligible to the modern mind ; but the ' identifi- 
cation' of which he complains happens to be part of the traditional 
doctrine, and I was endeavouring merely to make the best of it for 
modem Christians. I add St. Thomas' justification of it, which is 
substantially what I gave in Contentio Veritatis and have repeated 
above : ' Cum processiones divinas secundum aliquas actiones 
necesse est accipere, secundum bonitatem, et hujusmodi alia attributa, 
nou accipiuntur aliae processiones, nisi Verbi et amoris, secundum 



184 PHILOSOPHY AND KELIGION [lect. 

Thomas thought of the ' Persons ' as separate con- 
sciousnesses, is best seen from his doctrine (taken 
from Augustine) that the love of the Father for the Son 
is the Holy Spirit. The love of one Beiag for himself 
or for another is not a Person in the natural, normal, 
modem sense of the word : and it would be quite 
unorthodox to attribute Personality to the Son in 
any other sense than that in which it is attributed 
to the Holy Ghost. I do not myself attach any great 
importance to these technical phrases. I do not 

quod Dens suam essentiam, veritatem et bonitatem intelligit et 
amat' (Q. xxvii. Art. 5). The source of the doctrine is to be found in 
St. Augustine, who habitually speaks of the Holy .Spirit as Amor; but, 
when he refers to the ' Imago Trinitatis ' in man the Spirit is 
represented sometimes by 'Amor,' sometimes by 'Voluntas' (de Trin., 
L. xiv, cap 7). The other two members of the human triad are 
with him ' Memoria ' (or ' Mens ') and ' Intelligentia.' 

With regard to the diflQculty of distinguishing Power from Will, I was 
perhaps to blame for not giving St. Thomas' own word ' Principium,' 
The word ' Principium ' means the ir-r^y^ OedrrjTos, the ultimate Cause 
or Source of Being : by ' Voluntas ' St. Thomas means that actual 
putting forth of Power (in knowing and in loving the Word or Thought 
eternally begotten by God the Father) which is the Holy Ghost, I 
am far from saying that the details of St. Thomas' doctrine are not 
open to much criticism : a rough correspondence between his teaching 
and any view of God's Nature which can commend itself to a modern 
Philosopher is all that I endeavoured to point out. The modem 
thinker would no doubt with Dr. Sanday prefer the triad ' Power, 
Wisdom, Love,' or (I would suggest) 'Feeling, including Love as the 
highest form of Feeling.' The reason why St. Thomas will not accept 
such an interpretation is that his Aristotelianism (here not very con- 
sonant with the Jewish and Christian view of God) excludes all feeling 
or emotion from the divine nature : ' Love ' has therefore to be identi- 
fied with ' Will ' and not with ' Feeling.' I cannot but think that the 
Professor might have taken a little more trouble to understand both 
St. Thomas and myself before accusing either of us of 'looseness 
of reasoning.' 



yi.] CHRISTIANITY 185 

deny that the supremely important truth that God 
has received His fullest revelation in the historical 
Christ, and that He goes on revealing Himself in the 
hearts of men, might have been otherwise, more 
simply, to modem minds more intelligibly, expressed. 
There are detailed features of the patristic or the 
scholastic version of the doctrine which involve 
conceptions to which the most accomplished Pro- 
fessors of Theology would find it difl&cult or impos- 
sible to give a modem meaning. I do not know 
for instance that much would have been lost had 
Theology (with the all but canonical writers Clement 
of Rome and Hermas, with Ignatius, with Justin, 
with the philosophic Clement of Alexandria) con- 
tinued to speak indifferently of the Word and the 
Spirit. Yet taken by itself this Thomist doctrine 
of the Trinity is one to which it is quite possible to 
give a perfectly rational meaning, and a meaning 
probably very much nearer to that which was really 
intended by its author than the meaning which is 
usually put upon the Trinitarian formula by popular 
religious thought. That God is Power, and Wisdom, 
and Love is simply the essence of Christian Theism — 
not the less true because few Unitarians would 
repudiate it. 

(7) Once more let me briefly remind you that any 
claim for finality in the Christian Religion must be 
based on its power of perpetual development. 



186 PHILOSOPHY AND EELIGION [lect. 

Belief in the contiaued work of the Holy Spirit in 
the Church is an essential element of the Catholic 
Faith. We need not, with the Ritschlian, con- 
temptuously condemn the whole structure of 
Christian doctrine because undoubtedly it is a 
development of what was taught by Christ himself. 
Only, if we are to justify the development of the past, 
we must go on to assert the same right and duty of 
development in Ethics and lq Theology for the 
Church of the future. In the pregnant phrase of 
Loisy, the development which the Church is most 
in need of at the present moment is precisely a 
development ia the idea of development itself. 

But how can we tell (it may be asked), if we once 
admit that the development of Religion does not 
end with the teaching of Christ, where the develop- 
ment will stop ? If we are to admit an iadefinite 
possibility of growth and change, how do we know 
that Christianity itself will not one day be outgrown ? 
If we once admit that the final appeal is to the 
religious consciousness of the present, we must 
acknowledge that it is not possible to demonstrate 
a 'priori that the Christian Religion is the final, 
universal, or absolute Religion. All we can say is 
that we have no difficulty in recognizing that the 
development which has so far taken place, in so far 
as it, is a development which we can approve and 
accept, seems to us a development which leaves the 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 187 

Religion still essentially the Religion of Christ. In 
the whole structure of the modern Christian's religious 
belief, that which was contributed by Christ himself 
is incomparably the most important part — the basis 
of the whole structure. The essentials of Religion 
and Morality still seem to us to be contained in his 
teaching as they are contained nowhere else. All 
the rest that is included in an enlightened modern 
Christian's religious creed is either a direct working 
out of the principles akeady contained there, or (if 
it has come from other sources) it has been trans- 
formed in the process of adaptation. Nothing has 
been discovered in Religion and Morality which 
tends in any way to diminish the unique reverence 
which we feel for the person of Christ, the perfect 
sufficiency of his character to represent and Incarnate 
for us the character of God. It is a completely 
gratuitous assumption to suppose that it will ever 
lose that sufficiency. Even in the development of 
Science, there comes a time when its fundamentals 
are virtually beyond the reach of reconsideration. 
Still more in practical life, mere unmotived, gratuitous 
possibilities may be disregarded. It weakens the 
hold of fundamental convictions upon the mind to 
be perpetually contemplating the possibility or 
probability of fundamental revision. We ought no 
doubt to keep the spiritual ear ever open that we 
may always be hearing what the Spirit saith unto 



188 PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION [lect. 

the Churches. But to look forward to a time when 
any better way will be discovered of thinking of 
God than Jesus' way of thinking of Him as a loving 
Father is as gratuitous as to contemplate the prob- 
ability of something in human life at present unknown 
being discovered of greater value than Love. Until 
that discovery is made, our Religion will still remain 
the Religion of him who, by what he said and by 
what he was, taught the world to think of God as 
the supreme Love and the supreme Holiness, the 
source of all other love and all other holiness. 

LITERATURE 

The literature is here too vast to mention even the works of 
the very first importance : I can only select a very few books 
which have been useful to myself. The late Sir John Seeley'a 
Ucce Homo may be regarded as in the light of modern research 
a somewhat uncritical book, but it remains to my mind the 
most striking expression of the appeal which Christ makes 
to the Conscience of the modern world. It has proved a 
veritable fifth Gospel to many seekers after light. Bishop 
Moorhouse's little book, The Teaching of Christ, will serve as 
an introduction to the study of Christ's life and work. A more 
elaborate treatment of the subject, with which I am very 
much In sympathy, is Wendt's Teaching of Jesus. The ideal 
life of Christ perhaps remains to be written. Professor 
Sanday's Article on ' Jesus Christ ' in Hastings' Dictionary of 
the Bible may be mentioned as a good representative of 
moderate and scholarly Conservatism or Liberal Conservatism. 
Professor Oscar Holtzmann's Life of Jesus is based on more 
radical, perhaps over-radical, criticism. Professor Harnack'a 



VI.] CHRISTIANITY 189 

What is Christianity ? has become the typical expression of 
the Eitschlian attitude. The ideas of extreme Roman Catholic 
'Modernism' may be gathered from Loisy's VEvangile et 
V^glise and Auto^lr d'un Petit Livre. Professor Gardner's 
three books — Exploratio Evangelica, the shorter An Historic 
View of the New Testament, and The Growth of Christianity 
— may be especially commended to those who wish to satisfy 
themselves that a thorough-going recognition of the results 
of historical Criticism is compatible with a whole-hearted 
personal acceptance of Christianity. Dr. Fairbairn's Philo- 
sophy of the Christian Religion and Bousset's What is Religion? 
are especially valuable as vindications of the supreme position 
of Christianity combined with the fullest recognition of the 
measure of Revelation contained in aU the great historical 
Religions. Allen's Continuity of Christian Thought suggests 
what seems to me the right attitude of the modern thinker 
towards traditional dogma, though the author's position is 
more decidedly ' Hegelian ' than mine. I may also mention 
Professor Inge's contribution to Contentio Veritatis on ' The 
Personal Christ,' and some of the Essays in Lux Hominum. 
Though I cannot always agree with him, I recognize the high 
value of the Bishop of Birmingham's Bampton Lectures on 
The Divinity of Jesus Christ the Son of Ood and the accom- 
panying volume of Dissertations' 



Studies in Theology 

A New Series of Hand-books, being aids to interpretation 

in Biblical Criticism for the use of Ministers, 

Theological Students and general readers. 



12mo, cloth. 75 cents net per volume. 

THE aim of the series is described by the general title. 
It is an attempt to bring all the resources of modern 
learning to the interpretation of the Scriptures, and 
to place within the reach of all who are interested 
the broad conclusions arrived at by men of distinction in the 
world of Christian scholarship on the great problems of Faith 
and Destiny. The volumes are critical and constructive, and 
their value can scarcely be overstated. Each volume will 
contain bibliographies for the guidance of those who wish to 
pursue more extended studies. It is expected that the series 
will consist of 12 volumes. 

The writers selected for the various volumes are represen- 
tative scholars both in this country and in Europe. Each of 
them has been assigned a subject with which he is particularly 
qualified to deal, as will be at once apparent even in this 
preliminary announcement giving a list of some of the vol- 
umes in preparation. 

ARRANGEMENT OF VOLUMES 

A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

By Arthur Samuel Peake, D.D., Professor of Biblical Exegesis 
and Dean of the Faculty of Theology, Victoria University, Man- 
chester. Sometime Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. Author of 
"A Guide to Biblical Study," " The Problem of Suffering in the 
Old Testament," etc. [Ready. 

FAITH AND ITS PSYCHOLOGY. By the Rev. William R. Inge, 
D.D., Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Cambridge, and 
Bampton Lecturer, Oxford, 1899. Author of "Studies of the 
English Mystics," " Truth and Falsehood in Religion," " Personal 
Idealism and Mysticism," etc. [Ready. 

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. By the Rev. Hastings Rash- 
DALL, D.Litt. (Oxon.), D.C.L. CDunelm), F.B.A. Fellow and 
Tutor of New College, Oxford. Author of " The Theory of Good 
and Evil," etc., etc. [Ready. 



REVELATION AND INSPIRATION. By the Rev. James Ork, 
D.D., Professor of Apologetics in the Theological College of the 
United Free Church, Glasgow. Author of " The Christian View 
of God and the World," " The Ritschlian Theology and Evangelical 
Faith," " The Problem of the Old Testament," etc. [Ready. 

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEOLOGY. By the Rev. A. M. Fair- 
bairn, D.D., D.Litt., LL.D., Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. 
Author of " Studies in the Life of Christ," " Religion in History and 
in Modern Life," " Christ in Modern Theology," etc. 

A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

By the Rev. George Buchanan Gray, D.D., D.Litt., Professor 
of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis, Mansfield College, Oxford. 
Author of " The Divine Discipline of Israel," " Studies in Hebrew 
Proper Names," etc. 

CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS. By the Rev. Wil- 
liam Cunningham, D.D., F.B.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge. Hon. Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. 
Archdeacon of Ely. Formerly Lecturer on Economic History to 
Harvard University. Author of " Growth of English History and 
Commerce," etc. 

HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT FROM THE APOS= 
TOLIC AGE TO THE REFORMATION. By Herbert B. 
Workman, D.Litt., Principal of the Westminster Training College. 
Author of " The Church of the West in the Middle Ages," " The 
Dawn of the Reformation," etc. 

HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT FROM THE REFOR= 
MATION TO KANT. By A. C. McGiffert, PhD., D.D., Pro- 
fessor of Church History in the Union Theological Seminary, New 
York. Author of " The History of Christianity in the Apostolic 
Age," and " The Apostles' Creed." 

HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT SINCE KANT. By the 

Rev. Edward Caldwell Moore, D.D., Parkman Professor of 
Theology in Harvard University. Author of "The New Testa- 
ment in the Christian Church," etc. 

THE CHRISTIAN HOPE: A STUDY IN THE DOCTRINE 
OF THE LAST THINGS. By William Adams Brown, Ph.D., 
D.D., Professor of Systematic Theology in the Union Theological 
Seminary, New York. Author of " The Essence of Christianity," 
and " Christian Theology in Outline." 

Other volumes are in preparation and will be announced later. 



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